Here’s where I don my deerstalker and dig out my spyglass to act as an Excel Detective.

Many, many companies have Excel spreadsheets, macros and data processes which they have inherited. Perhaps they were set up by a member of staff who has now left, or maybe they were built by a consultant who you’re no longer working with. Either way the spreadsheet doesn’t quite fit your current business requirements or staff don’t have the knowledge of Excel to fully understand how the formulas or macros works, often causing frustration, wasted time (money!) and inaccuracies.

Working primarily in Shropshire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire I can help you by examining your data, business processes and existing tools and talking with you and your staff to understand what and how you want your business to work. Together we can unpick these legacy spreadsheets and rebuild them for your current business needs, leaving staff fully understanding how they work and back in control of your data.

Contact me for a chat, and I can come and investigate with the aim of leaving your business tools doing the job they’re meant to do.

“Knowledge is power” – Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power, but sometimes accessing that knowledge can be overwhelming, and let’s face it for many people data is nothing more than a cumbersome burden. As a Data Analyst and Management Information Expert I’ve over 15 years experience in helping companies to understand more about their business through sifting their data. But what sort of data, what is business intelligence and what sort of help can it be to your company?

Well variety is the spice of life and I’ve a number of transferrable skills and expertise which I can bring to any kind of data. For example I’ve:

• worked with finance teams to review the costs of third party suppliers and identified errors and anomalies – this on two dozen archive boxes of invoices
• looked at the fuel consumption of a fleet of vehicles, analysing patterns in consumption and helped to identify problems as well as showing where efficiences could be made and putting together a tool to forecast future consumption – on a vehicle fleet of thousands of vehicles
• analysed attendance records of participants at activities – covering a dozen centres and looking back over 6 years to build profiles of users and centres.
• analysed non payment records to help inform future decision making around client’s behaviour
• forecast energy consumption and built tools to enable drill down access to client’s individual records

By using my skills in data manipulation (Excel, VBA, Access and SQL) I can help you pull out facts from your data and design management information systems to monitor and track your key performance measures. I use a variety of tools and depending on the amount of data involved can work with you to identify what data tools best suit your business. For example is Excel the right place for your data? Should you be converting to Access or an SQL database?

As well as working on one-off data mining projects I’ve built a number of reporting tools to collate data and present it in meaningful ways on a regular basis. I’m passionate about helping people understand their data and hope that this passion translates into userfriendly and understandable reports and dashboards that can be used to monitor key pieces of management information and key performance indicators.

I’ll expand more over the coming weeks but in the meantime if you’re based in Shropshire, Staffordshire, Hereford, Worcestershire or the surrounding counties then do drop me a line if you’d like to discuss how I can help you then get in touch or leave me a comment below.

My next post will be around my work on breaking down existing spreadsheets and processes as an Excel detective but tell me, what do you want to know about me and about Deaconsulting?