Press Release - Winter 2009

The return of PERT

Earlier this year E-Tabs, the report automation experts celebrated the return of an important client. After a thorough evaluation of various report automation methods, THE pert GROUP returned to E-Tabs to take on E-Tabs Enterprise - our flagship report automation software.

This is THE pert GROUP’s story... (Adapted from Laura Pienkowski's Presentation at Automate’09)

THE pert GROUP were first acquainted with report automation in 2003. With several clients requiring excel as their deliverables the E-Tabs Professional Reader and Writer software gave us the ability to convert plain text files and ASCII files into Excel. Until then we’d been delivering ASCII files to clients and where Excel deliverables were required we were faced with hand entering data into Excel.

Where the old process by hand would take approximately 2-3 days per file, by using E-Tabs that time was cut to less than 2-3 hours per file. Instead of completing 1 file in 2-3 days, you would have 2-3 files in 1 day. The files were much more accurate, since we were taking the exact tables that were created and just converting instead of hand entering, proofing time was cut as well, because the tables were exactly as output. It wasn’t long before the graphics department wanted to investigate how report automation could assist them in putting together PowerPoint deliverables.

Our initial investigation showed us that graphical automation was possible but we wanted more, and yearned for the dream product...

The dream product is the product that does everything, a product that needs no hand manipulation, a product that colorizes the way you want and that lines up the way you want it to. If one of the fundamentals of report automation is to eliminate manual tasks and save you time, it’s easy to fall into the trap of questioning how any product that requires a level of hand editing (an element of every report automation process) can save you time?

E-Tabs announced it was Office 2007 compatible, and we jumped at the chance, we knew we’d have the support we needed coming back and we took another look at E-Tabs Enterprise. When we’d first looked at Enterprise it seemed more extensive than we needed at the time. Looking at it the second time around we had grown in our knowledge of automation concepts and felt ready for the challenge. Using E-Tabs Enterprise we managed to cut presentation creation time by roughly 70% of what it used to be.

When it comes to report automation it’s what the product can do for you that’s important. Think about what it is you want to achieve, how much time or money is it likely to save you?

Whether or not it’s important that the entire project be put through the automation tool depends on what you are doing. With Enterprise, you can do almost anything!! Any project should be able to go through Enterprise and come out pretty darn close to what you want, since you are tagging and grabbing the data. You can use multiple source files. You could have a set of tables and a spending table and both can be used in a chart.

To view the full presentation "The Danger of all or nothing thinking in automation" Laura Pienkowski, Project Specialist, THE pert GROUP, please visit www.e-tabs.com.

For further information on report automation please visit www.e-tabs.com