Porter, Allen H <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> Taking a page from Reflection's, I recently had a project that required a
> report that would show what percentage of a wholesaler's clients meeting
> certain conditions.  This information was constantly changing as we
gathered
> more data.  The project directors need to see this information for 850+
> wholesalers throughout the day to make decisions.  They also had tolerance
> levels set for these conditions.  I set up an HP script menu system to
allow
> the project director to run the report at will.  The report was a comma
> delimited file which the script downloaded to the users PC after creation.
> The script then initiated a Reflection script residing on one of our
> servers.  This Reflection script started Excel and ran a macro that
imported
> the data into a shell xls file.  The Excel file had VB macros that allowed
> them to manipulate the data in various ways, highlighted wholesalers that
> were below tolerance levels, etc.  This gave the user much more power (and
> just as important, kept them from coming to me 4 times a day!).  The data
> became more valuable because they could gain access to it at will and
> manipulate it themselves.
>
> Some of the problems we encountered were access rights to the server,
> version differences in Excel, and version issues in Reflection.

Hmmmm.  You could have probably done the same thing all on the HP3000 using
QueryCalc from our friends at AICS.  We have some nice pie charts generated
from QueryCalc using shipping requirements and shipments to date on the
HP3000 that give us a nice picture of our delivery performance for any given
customer (or set of customers if need be).

Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]     Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   10513 Freedom Street
  Web: http://www.tolwire.com  Garrettsville, Ohio  44231