Christmas is over and I received a very nice Christmas present. I was doing a quick Google search to check on our website (after the recent outage) and found an interesting blog post on Dodeca. Jason Jones describes how they are using our Dodeca product to replace what they had previously done in Essbase with Excel VBA and instead create a cohesive work environment. Here is the link to the blog entry.
In the blog post, Jason describes one of their alternatives is to write 'a little home brew VBA action' to meet their needs. That statement reminded me of a conversation I had with one of Jason's coworkers a while back. He was showing me one of the reports they generated with Dodeca. Previous to Dodeca, this certain report was generated 'by hand' by someone working overtime *every* Saturday to have it ready for the executive team on Monday morning. Once the report was implemented in Dodeca, it is now generated in Dodeca in about 35 seconds. No more overtime!
"The report is pretty complex. It has 68 different retrieve ranges and pulls data from 3 different Essbase databases." stated the coworker.
"68 retrieve ranges???" I asked.
"Yes, and 60 of them are sorted after the retrieval." he replied. "That is nothing... We have one report with over 250 retrieve ranges."
What is the best feature of Dodeca used in this case? The report described here was created entirely with out-of-the-box functionality by the coworker who had just a few hours of on-line training in how to use Dodeca. You know, visioning the Dodeca product and leading the team that has built it is the real joy of being an entrepreneur.
The best part of the story is the value it provides to the company. Although the coworker could tell me about the mechanics of the report, he couldn't discuss the nature of the content due to the competitive advantage they enjoy. I am happy they allowed us to help.
