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It's almost time to unveil Viney@rd version 1.2.1. It includes a couple of new features which were true open points for those who work with Excel. Our target is to make their life easier an easier and this is the compass we follow for improving Viney@rd. ... read more...
You know me. I usually do not lean toward deep philosophical thoughts; I'm rather the average Joe type. This time, on the contrary, I'm going to start from two Jeffrey Pfeffer's deep and insightful articles from the Harvard Business Review to derive what your grandpa likely told you many years ago. My contribution will be dropping in a smart idea or two. ... read more...
This is a very very primitive idea for the new site.
Please, feel free to express your opinion! I'd love if the site were the outcome of shared ideas!
We have seen all the main issues regarding the high section of the P&L statement. We have learned that each and every line should be analyzed according to responsibility criteria. We have also seen how measures should mimic the sales events.
Now it's time to go below the net sales value and see what to do with costs. ... read more...
From Admin (Posted 6/23/2010 @ 17:00:58, in Post, linked 211 times)
Today I leave aside Excel, BI and other technicalities; I feel like talking about interactions on the internet.
Did you ever notice how, on the web, everyone is so kind? Comment on a blog you'll be acknowledged. Retweet a link and many will politely say thank you. ... read more...
From Admin (Posted 6/17/2010 @ 11:22:11, in Post, linked 191 times)
I recently learnt that the famous Excel Blogger Chandoo has a new initiative. He set up an Excel School.
http://chandoo.org/wp/excel-school/
This guy is an Excel MVP but his style is what makes the difference. He's light, simple clear and to the point.
If I needed some Excel training, chandoo.org is a place I'd consider.
I'm not affiliated with Chandoo.org, this is simply my opinion, based on what I read on the site.
 At the top of P&L tower sales. This is the starting point for each and every analysis. Then you subtract the costs and get the margin, right? Wrong. What about the other sales events?
Better, what is a sales event? There are four main sales events, the orders, the returns , the complimentary offers and the giveaways.... read more...
 This is a leap forward along the Business Analysis storyline, but I recently wrote about it elsewhere and I realized that this simple model can be of great help for startups. I'm going to talk about your company balances, but not in the terms you're thinking. ... read more...
I'm sure that you often had to do with sales data marts. I'm sure you designed, implemented and reported against it many times. Actually, sales and margins are often the first business areas to be covered by a BI implementation. Sometimes accounting leads the pack, but usually sales are the first subject on the list.
Implementing sales is somewhat easier than other datamarts because the granularity is almost invariably defined by the sales events. That is, each line in your fact table will likely be an order/invoice line. ... read more...
It' s incredible the amount of feedback a video can have.
I've always been reluctant to resort to videos because they always imply oversimplification. More, they are complex to build, especially if you do not have the money for a decent video editing sw, a professional speaker and you are not a native English speaker. ... read more...
I love Excel, I think it's pretty obvious. I'm not alone, millions and millions of people around the world use it too and, more or less, love it. The vast majority of these people use it to work on, manipulate and display data of all kind.
What's strange about Excel is that the very reasons because it is loved by people are the same reasons why it is execrated by IT professionals.... read more...
This is the fourth post dedicated to business analysis for BI consultants. The series start here.
In the previous post we saw that the Income Statement may have multiple forms (and even multiple names, because it is sometimes called Profit & Loss statement, P&L). An Income statement suited for management purposes shows costs related to the company operations, usually splitting them among direct and indirect costs.
So far, we have designed a companywide Income Statement while management often needs data at a lower level. So you'll be asked to build a sliceable income statement. I'm sure many are familiar with the idea; from a technical perspective is "just another dimension", but what are the business perspectives tied to those dimensions?
Considering the company as a whole, two kind of dimensions come into play: business line and business unit.
The business line mirrors a specific internal organization upon different business. Consider a company which manufactures bulldozers. It runs two entirely different businesses: the dozers business (with salesmen, expositions, advertising, large customers and small owners etc.) and the spare parts business (with country repairers, inventory turns, urgent calls etc.). No use to say, these are very different organizations with different people with different operations and mindset. Nonetheless, the two lines use some common services, like accounting, human resources etc.
The business unit is the radicalization of this concept or the result of an aggregation of more than one company. Business units are practically companies of their own. In fact, a business unit is often defined such by having its own P&L statement whose format can be different from other business units.
What's important to understand, in our perspective, is that two business lines or two business units may greatly differ for the others dimensions. Just think to the bulldozers example, they indeed have a different sales force and an entire machine is likely classified rather differently than a spare part.
There's a third concept that many "Db Wizards" do not even suspect it's there. We talk about business and sales, hearth movers sales, spare parts sales an old machinery sold as second-hand toolsets. What distinguish the first two items from the latter? They are all sales, aren't they? Yes, they're sales but getting rid of old machinery is not part of the company everyday operations. A managerial P&L tracks only the ordinary activity, the company income statement tracks everything. One of the requisites for the company to thrive is to have a positive bottom line for the ordinary activity.
So far we haven't reached even the first line of the P&L statement, usually sales. In the next post we'll discuss how to slice and dice sales.
From Admin (Posted 4/15/2010 @ 01:25:36, in Post, linked 379 times)
I break the Business analysis for BI consultants series for a post that has been inspired by a discussion on the well known Joel on Software forum. This post is a slightly developed version of my reply to the thread titled: Why you should unlearn your MBA ... read more...
Let's get a short break from blogging to list a few books I've found useful. If you want to run ahead of the lessons, well, use these texts!
This is a good, hands-on, primer for understanding the basics of business analysis.
This is quite costly but has formed generations of students. A must read.
Probably you think that accounting is a boring and dry subject, don't you?
I'll be back soon with the next post. Good reading!!
In the previous post we saw the classic, but I'd rather say the "accountant's" form of the Income Statement. Income Statements do not come always in this forms, there are many other forms, each one focuses on different company facts.... read more...
 One of the most common user request is "How much am I earning?" This question is second only to "How much am I selling?". Often projects start just to have an efficient reply to these two questions. Notice that the two questions are only superficially similar but an ocean lays in the middle . Let's start.... read more...
We've been talking too much about technologies, myself included. There's a focus in BI community on the emerging trends of cloud computing, in memory processing, columnar stores etc. but the link with business requirements is weak. ... read more...
Last week I had a discussion on UK Business Forums about Viney@rd. You can find it here .
Garyk gave me the opportunity to explain why some things are like they are in Viney@rd. This is an interesting discussion and I post it here, slightly edited ... read more...
From Admin (Posted 3/6/2010 @ 14:51:54, in Post, linked 622 times)
As I promised quite a long time ago, I make a list of the Business Intelligence sites I regularly read.
I'm not always on the topics being discussed, but I learnt a lot for sure from them. I'll never thank enough those people who share their knowledge online. This is by no mean a complete or a popularity based list, and is grounded only in my personal taste. ... read more...
 Whenever I use the term " Natural key" in a tweet or on Facebook, someone always DM me to remind me how natural keys are worthless. I should use the brave and muscular surrogate keys for each and every task. Maybe is a frame of mind, but whenever there are strong technical debates I feel naturally inclined to the minority.
In this case my point is that natural keys are perfectly adequate for many Business Intelligence tasks, and should be replaced by surrogate keys only when necessary.
... read more...
From Admin (Posted 12/21/2009 @ 00:25:16, in Post, linked 336 times)
Like many others, I regularly read a number of blogs. Reading, for me, is a way to relax after a tough mental effort like coding or a stressful consulting day. I even can't sleep if I do not read something. The written word is the only way to take my mind on a safe path before sleeping. No use to say I want to learn something from reading.
Blogs are the main information source on the Internet. In my opinion the blog format is perfectly suited to the Internet use; it must not be as coherent as a book, it is shorter and it may have a touch of personal diary which closes the gap between the author and the reader.
I want to start with Startup and Software Entrepreneurship ... read more...
This is the fourth and last post of a series dedicated to Viney@rd features. Find the first here, the second here and the third here.
One of the Viney@rd groundbreaking features is enabling the user to fully control the model content by simply compiling a worksheet in Excel.
Two things, nonetheless, may be particularly annoying while doing this.... read more...
This is the third post of a series dedicated to Viney@rd features. Find the first here and the second here.
 Viney@rd has its own query feature, which can draw tables on Excel worksheets, but it is aimed mainly at creating complex, refreshable, layouts. It is easy to understand that, while this is felt by many as a requirement not fulfilled by classical BI tools, it is not the best approach to data analysis. Controllers and data analysts require both. Nonetheless Excel has a powerful built-in feature to analyze data, the pivot tables.
One of the ideas underlying Viney@rd is not to cater twice what the user has already purchased, so, instead of duplicating the feature, I created something to integrate pivot tables with Viney@rd.
From Viney@rd client you can create a workbook connection to a model. The connection exposes as fields all the dimensions, the attributes and the measures. So, you can analyze all these data in the usual way.
With this feature you can also use Viney@rd data as a source for PowerPivot engine in the coming 2010 version, working with an even better analysis tool.
Try Viney@rd, 3 months, fully functional demo!
Learn more about Viney@rd
This is the second post of a series dedicated to Viney@rd features. Find the first here.
Viney@rd is not a mere reporting tool. While the ability to feed each single cell in a worksheet is very important, all the model building process made through MasterBook.xls has a very high value added. The key point is that no database knowledge is required and data can be saved within models directly by Excel.... read more...
This is the
first post of a series focused on a single Viney@rd feature, to let you know
about those features which are not immediately visible but, all together, build
up Viney@rd strength.
Let’s start
with query synchronization.
In a
workbook you can often have two similar queries, which differ only from few
particulars, mainly conditions. A typical case is the current year vs previous year or budget comparison.
... read more...
From Admin (Posted 11/22/2009 @ 00:13:38, in Post, linked 330 times)
Some software entrepreneurs, when asked, say that their market is whoever buys the box.  Some have a clue about who their customers are, but they really do not know well. Some others have a razor sharp knowledge of their market and carefully drive their application development: they know their market positioning.
Market positioning is not something that happens, it is a choice that should drive your development efforts. So, it is worth knowing something about. In this post I will even resist the urge to explain where Viney@rd is positioned within the market, so keep reading safely. ... read more...
I've been asked about how Viney@rd relates with the environment that Microsoft is designing with PowerPivot, Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010 upgrades ( Gregory and Rob, thank you for considering!). I didn't have had the occasion to dig deep in all those applications yet, so I want to lay only few points that appear quite acquired so far.
I must confess that there has been a moment when I feared that Viney@rd was doomed to become a poor copy. Luckily, some of the ideas which Viney@rd is based upon are such that the others are too snob to implement them ;o)... read more...
From Admin (Posted 11/11/2009 @ 01:08:32, in Post, linked 320 times)
 When I'm working on Viney@rd I spend quite a large amount of time surfing the web, checking blogs on Twitter and Facebook. I try to connect with people who could be interested to Viney@rd, of course. Seen from the outside this activity appear to be a waste of time.... read more...
Building version 1.1 has been a tough work, that's why I disappeared for a while. New features have been added but, most of all, a lot of testing has been done, making this release a lot more stable than the previous.
The leit-motiv of this release is "Listen to the users".
... read more...
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