Background
Hawkins Wright (HW) is an independent consultancy providing business information services to the forest products and bio-energy industries. The company has been providing forest business information services since 1982. The key services that the company offers include, private consultancy assignments covering a full range of marketing and strategic subjects as well as regular multi-client reports and newsletters. The company provides industry specific information as per the macro- and micro-economic trends driving the international forest industry and downstream product markets. Assignments may include advising a client’s business development or feedstock sourcing strategies to a detailed market feasibility assessment of prospective projects.
The Requirement
Keeping a tab on the industry trends and generating reports to convey information to their end customers is one of the most crucial parts of HW’s consultancy driven approach. This involved compilation of huge data on a daily basis, converting compiled data into systematic reports- a time consuming process that needed immediate attention. HW would compile and save all industry related data into Microsoft Excel sheets and generate reports using MS Publisher. This meant that the HW staff had to spend a large portion of their working hours navigating a maze of screens to generate reports. HW was faced with the challenge of developing a system in which time consuming manual print jobs could be automated.
The Challenge
The company had been using Microsoft Excel to enter and save their crucial data. The idea of coming up with a new set up or a new application with data import features didn’t interest Hawkins Wright team much. The HW team had been working on Excel for several years and preferred to continue using the same. A new application with data import features would only complicate things for them and they felt that the new application would be a time consuming process. The challenge now was to bring technical advancement to their overall work structure without disturbing their basic working style. In simple words, we had to find out a solution which would bridge the gap between their working patterns and provide acceleration to it as well.
Our Solution Approach
We planned to upgrade Excel so that it could generate reports, without requiring much manual activity. We created Excel plug-ins, and this allowed all the XML data to be imported in Excel documents.
The plug-in provide following major features
Export numeric data from Excel table to XML file
Export charts into images and storing image path in XML file
Generate and publish HTML/PDF reports to the website
Distribute the PDF report to the subscribers
Create the CSV file for synchronising data with ACT
Create the CSV file for synchronising data with SAGE
Update the configurations
We used Adobe InDesign and defined the templates with placeholders to display numeric data table and chart. The XML file generated with numeric data and chart/image information is imported in Adobe InDesign template. Text comments are added into the InDesign template directly and then the final report is exported into PDF format for distribution.
We have also provided an installer that installs and configures the plug-in easily avoiding the complex steps to add a plugin.
Technologies
We used Visual Basic for creating MS Excel plug-in which exports data into XML file. We have also used third party applications like Adobe InDesign to create PDF, SAGE for accountancy and ACT for subscribers management.
The Result
The application remarkably brought down the total number of man hours that Hawkins Wright needed to generate monthly market reports. This not only cut down their operational costs, saved time and also enhanced overall efficiency.