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Overview Biwater has a long relationship with Village Software Engineering Limited and called upon Village to develop a new system for monitoring project costs. Village developed this with a spreadsheet front end familiar to the project managers, but linked into Biwater's main transaction system. Visual Basic for Applications was the main development tool. Return on Investment  The most noticeable benefit of this system is the large saving in project managers' time - avoiding re-keying of project data. The manipulation of the original spreadsheet had been error prone and did not provide data that could fully be trusted by management. By eliminating any ambiguities in the data, the new system focused decision-makers’ time on productive examination of forecasts and spending.
Company Background Biwater is a leading worldwide supplier of water treatment solutions. It undertakes the design and construction of water and wastewater infrastructure, incorporating intake works, reservoirs, dams, treatment works and pipelines. The Contract Review System is used to track costs and to compare them with forecasts for each engineering project. Situation Management at Biwater had designed a Management Information System using Excel spreadsheets. This replaced previous software that was not millennium compliant. The spreadsheet was designed to examine forecast costs and actual costs on projects. Data was entered into the system on a monthly basis by manual keying. However the re-keying of data from other systems was time consuming and error prone. This sometimes prevented managers from having the information they could rely on to control project costs. It was important to eliminate any disputes regarding actual project costs so that the project managers could concentrate on their forecasts Solution  One of Village's software engineers met with an analyst from Biwater's IT Division. They identified the sources of data and the structure of the various cost fields. The primary source of data was Biwater's transaction management system 'Mentor Enterprise Accounting Suite'. Data was extracted directly from the Mentor database into the spreadsheets. Additional functionality was added to roll on forecasts not held in Mentor between months.
Feedback from the users, when they saw the new facilities offered, led to Village creating extensions, such as a plant hire workbook. Technology  The customer stipulated presentation with a particular layout of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The system was developed in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). The Mentor system uses an Informix database and suitable components were used to connect this to an ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver on the company's Windows PCs. Data was extracted from the Informix Database using SQL and Microsoft Query.
The choice of software that connects the front end of a project (Excel in this case) with the database server (Informix) over the available network is a key technology problem for these types of development. General Conclusions It is critical to the acceptance of a management information system inside an organisation that the data stored must be accurate and timely. Normally to provide this it must be sourced from a transaction system such as the Informix database at the heart of the Mentor Enterprise Suite used by Biwater. On this occasion the quantity of re-keying of data was leading to uncertainty and to a heavy demand on the time of the project engineers. As a rule organisations should aim to key data only once in their IT systems. A development of this type would cost about £5,000 to £10,000. It might be undertaken with Excel as the user interface or developed in a database development environment such as Access, Delphi or C++ Builder. Alternatively it could be developed with a Web based front end. |
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Mar 2010
