Management information specialist and Excel detective
Services
Efficiency – saving time is saving money
Jul 11th
By working with you to review your business processes, improve your spreadsheets and provide a more streamlined workflow I can help make you more efficient. Don’t switch off, this really is important stuff – there’s never been a more important time to be working as efficiently and as effectively as you can. Being more efficient might not seem on the face of it to be as important as bringing in the money but time is money said Benjamin Franklin.
Let’s put it another way, if I can save you just a minute on a task that you do twice a day, then over the course of the year that will have saved you a whole working day. All those wasted seconds moving between spreadsheets, retyping in data or copying and pasting may not seem like much but they add up and eat into your core business activity, whatever that might be.
Recently I’ve done some Excel detective work with a client, helping them to improve a process that typically took around 3 hours a month. By making some changes to the spreadsheet and ensuring that they understood a few particular excel commands we’ve dropped that to just 15 minutes. Apart from the fact that they were now no longer dreading the task the time saving is around 4 ½ days a year.
If time is money, what’s your hourly rate? Can you afford for your staff to be spending time unnecessarily on tasks which could be done quicker and more effectively? I’m happy to come in and take a look at your processes, spreadsheets that you use and how they interact with other Microsoft products and your other software and take a look to see if I can help save you money.
A good friend (Leighton, from Maison Jaune) pointed me in the direction of a recent blog post from Seth Godin, a well known American entrepreneur. It’s a short blog post and is on exactly this topic. You can read it here – and then, back to work. Time is money don’t forget…
What’s your Excel problem?
Jun 2nd
One of my goals on this blog is to have some posts on how I can help you take control of your spreadsheets and data, together with real excel hints, tips and guidance which can help you be more effective.
A huge amount of what I use on a daily basis has been gleaned from excel blogs and tutorials and I hope in a small way to add my voice to help people find easy solutions to their spreadsheet problems to enhance their data analysis and management information.
But what do you want to know? What really bugs you in Excel? What have you always wondered how it works? Have you had a spreadsheet problem to be fixed or a dashboard which isn’t doing its job? Any tips you’d like to share yourself? I would love to receive feedback on what you want and need to hear, let me know using the comments below and I’ll try to make sure I cover all suggestions over the coming months.
PRINCE2 project management
Apr 13th
I’ve been trying and failing to come up with royal wedding related gags given that this post is about a prince, well PRINCE2 anyway. This morning I got an email with my results from the PRINCE2 project management course that I took back in March.
PRINCE2 is a project management approach used widely to add structure and a clear framework to project work. I was very lucky to have a hugely experienced and knowledgable trainer – Carole Elliott, from Maven Training – whose infectious enthusiasm and lively approach kept us engaged and the week interesting.
Whilst I knew that I had passed the first part – PRINCE2 foundation – we had to wait for a few weeks to find out the results of the final practitioner exam and….. (drum roll please)…… happily I have passed. It was a tough week and I had to travel to Birmingham as the training is not available in Shropshire but I’m delighted with my score and am looking forward to putting my new skills to the test.
Detangling: Excel Detective
Apr 11th
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.
Detailing: Management Information Analyst
Apr 4th
“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?