C4 Carbides

Financial Reports Application

About the Company

C4 Carbides, an award-winning diamond-tipped drill manufacturer based in Cambridge, found themselves with ever-increasing customer demand and it quickly became clear that they needed a solution that upgraded three of their important internal reports.

Each of the three reports were integral to how C4 Carbides analysed and maintained their sales, their employee productivity and their production efficiency. Before coming to Solweb, C4 Carbides were manually updating their spreadsheet data and then that data over to a separate workbook. This process could take several hours and could be prone to errors if left to a non-experienced user.

One of the challenges that presented itself was the use of fixed costs that were external to 123insight. They provided us with a spreadsheet which contained a standard cost breakdown of their parts which included a material cost, a subcontract and unit cost that would be handled by one of the reports.

Labour Report
Breakdown of the amount of productive and non-productive time spent on various resources for a particular month.

Works Order Report
A yearly overview of their works order efficiency, broken down by month with a summary sheet and various graphs.

Weekly Backlog Report
A financial report that is used to track their sales budget and total value of all open and invoiced sales orders over their financial year and the current year to date.

Requirements Overview

C4 Carbides required a simple, one-click-go solution that would generate all three in an identical layout to their previous reports. It would need to be easy to use and integrate directly with both their 123insight database and external documents, whilst also requiring little to no prior experience with the application.

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Solution

We started off with a consultation session where they outlined their needs and took our development team through the process of how they develop their reports. Once we had acquired an array of notes and supporting documents, our consultant developers could ask more direct questions regarding formulas and start to construct a methodology that the application could follow.

The solution was an application that would allow C4 Carbides to upload their supporting documents into tables stored against their 123insight database, they would be given the ability to specify when the data would be valid and if necessary, overwrite existing data. This gave C4 Carbides control over their own data without having someone else to automate the process for them.

The application uses a simple main window which allows the users to select their report, required values are defaulted into the filter selection but if required, the user can change and specify more filters to be added to the data within the report.

Outcome

C4 Carbides were provided with an application that within seconds generates a report which would otherwise have taken several hours. It does so using reliable data maintained by both their internal teams and their 123insight package.

We approached Solweb to create an application that would make generating our weekly sales report easier and more efficient. Solweb took the time to really understand our needs and came up with a very elegant solution. Their support staff were patient and very quick to respond to queries. We are very pleased with the results and our experience with Solweb

Mr Linday Taylor, Internal Sales Team Leader, C4 Carbides Ltd