Some solutions we developed with “that abomination VB” :
• Turned a two week per month sales commission process for a national distributor of medical devices into a 30 minute clerical task. The other benefit was that ‘knowledge transfer’ of the commission process took place between the staff and the tool, reducing the risk of talent flight in a critical administrative role
• Created a ‘sale visualization’ for a SAP sales company, integrating reporting for 8 different lines of business
• Turned 1,500 paper stock LTI agreements (In duplicate!) into an electronic process for a national insurance company
• Created 5,000 salary and bonus planning tools with a click of the mouse, with email distribution, and automated tool consolidation and reporting
• Created a ‘calculator’ for an international oil company as they rolled out a new expatriate pay program, so current and potential expats can see the actual result of the change
There is no shortage of information in any company. What is missing is the enabling technology to bring the data into an actionable view at a reasonable cost. Without the enabling technology, information integration and analysis is turned into more work - a manual process, multiple ‘cut and paste’ and repetitive tasks. This is where the hours in the day are stolen from higher value work.
We provide the answer. We automate repetitive, time-intensive tasks, and give clients “click of the mouse” ease, taking the hours and cost out of any process. There are no limits to what we can deliver. And yes, sometimes we store data. Usually things that either couldn't be stored by the system of record, or would be prohibitively expensive to make extensive system modifications. I am located in OK, but we do work around the world.
It may not be sexy, but we deliver sophisticated and powerful solutions Better, Faster and Cheaper.
I understand, smaller solutions. Sorry, I'm used to dealing with hundreds of millions of complex interrelated records and terabytes of data where 1% faster execution means hours saved. Excel can handle your stuff, but I'd still be worried about transactional atomicity and referential integrity when using it to manage any important data.
It may not be sexy, but we deliver sophisticated and powerful solutions Better, Faster and Cheaper
And it could be more sophisticated, better, faster and cheaper if you'd dump VB and migrate to c#. A few days ago I had a single-purpose need to crunch about a million small records held in Excel files. So I knocked together a multi-threaded c# app using generic lists and LINQ to crunch the Excel data through interop. The lists, seriously, if you'd still using those VB arrays, the lists and especially generic lists will be astonishing. No more "Redim Preserve" crap. And if you're really going for performance, those generics help (avoid casting, and boxing/unboxing). Technically VB.NET has these too, but as with the object orientation they're poorly tacked on to an ancient procedural language. C# was object-oriented and strongly typed from the beginning, so all that comes naturally and with elegant semantics. I do remember some benchmarks a while back showing functionally identical c# code to be faster, especially in I/O. YMMV
I used to do mainly VB too long ago for applications, but then I graduated and there's no way I'm going back. Time to look forward, come into this decade. You can resist the dark side.