CODEWORK
TANGRAM
- A management presentation
All managers know that their success depends on the quality of the information they can count on. Reliable, up-to-date information that becomes hard answers to unanticipated questions.
Without this information backup, the manager is compelled to spend most of his time to wade through computer listings, to locate and manually compare the data on which his current decision should be based.
In this sorry state of affairs the manager fails to perceive the actual state of the company or the emerging business opportunities -in a word, he is unable to promptly react to a changing environment.
Fresh and reliable information, that can be viewed from any facet, means a sound base for decisions and the ability to re-adjust the decision to the situation. This is where innovative software technology can really help.
TANGRAM was developed and refined with these objectives in mind and is the ideal tool to give you a competitive edge and a versatile decision-making style.
OLAP scheme. Click to enlarge
TANGRAM's basic approach is to carefully define the body of useful data and then to offer maximum flexibility in extracting hard facts from such data.
TANGRAM can, of course, handle multi-way tables (also known as hypercubes), aggregate, roll up and drill down (that is, jump from synthesis to analysis).
But there is more to it:
- What if and simulation support: you want to support your intuition with a whole set of consistent reports. "What would happen to the bottom line if this promotion campaign was delayed ?"
- Targeting: What must be done to achieve a given result?"What level of revenues would yield a break-even margin?"
- Detect and alert: which events must be automatically brought to your attention ? For instance: negative margins, decreasing revenues, below target performance, critical cashflow, ... or whatever demands either in-depth analysis or immediate action.
As you can see, the applications are countless and provide effective support to different classes of people:
- financial analysts - budget revision, foreign currency conversions, consolidation,...
- accountants - cost allocation, study of past performance, elimination scenarios,...
- product managers - analysis by product line, by distribution channel, by region, by responsibility,...
Your objective is not to sport a brand-new high-tech software for the initiated but to arm yourself with a dependable reasoning tool that will respond to direct use by any staff level.
The ultimate measure of its success is company performance.
Management and EDP department seldom get along very well. This often results in an armed truce, after which management deploys its staff to produce a myriad of limited-scope, private and unmaintainable applications.
This is not a panacea for the management's central problem: react to change, promptly and effectively.
With TANGRAM end-users can take full responsibility in defining, handling and managing their key data, with a payoff for everybody involved:
- the manager does not depend on the time-schedule and priorities of the EDP department. He obtains up-to-date, reliable, interpreted information from his own staff.
- the staff is freed from the nightmare of do-it-yourself disposable applications. With a powerful and integrated system it can offer real decision support within a shorter time-scale and with maximum versatility.
- the EDP manager is now set free from the never-ending and highly urgent requests for ad-hoc programming. He can now concentrate on his institutional duty, that is, the management of the company's info system.
- the top management is kept up-to-date on the company health and is self-sufficient in obtaining all kinds of detailed or aggregated data - just to follow a train of thought, as it were.
TANGRAM is a modern response to an age-old need: quality decisions depend on quality information.
TANGRAM can be classified as a DSS-OLAP tool: a software that grafts a tradition of Decision Support Systems on the more recent technologies known as On-Line Analytical Processing.
But with a character of its own :
- It is the only tool that runs on inexpensive PC LAN's - as opposed to a network of costly workstations - without sacrificing the complexity it can handle or the advanced features needed by multi-way tables.
- It lets you handle surprisingly large data volumes. A typical Pentium PC equipped with TANGRAM can handle databases of tens of millions of records before performance starts to drop.
- It is ideal for immediate and direct use. Other DSS-OLAP tools require software specialists that formulate queries to the system. Still others require an application development phase that may last months - and is often redone all over again when the company scenario changes.
- It is an open ended system: more sophisticated requests are handled by learning more creative ways of driving the system. Other tools limit themselves to a pre-defined set of options and features (and offer traditional programming as a last resort).
- It is very versatile in accessing data from a variety of sources: information system, DBMS, legacy files, spreadsheets, ...
- It is the right choice whenever you need short response times, on-the-fly solutions, reusability and ease of maintenance.
- It facilitates auditing and application sharing. This means that an application must not be the private property of its author. Instead, it must be self-documenting for the benefit of the whole company.
- Safety and data reliability are also design objectives. They are achieved via unambiguous nomenclatures, rational coding schemes, unique data sources, prompt updating, fully automated computations,...
- It offers a variety of interfaces to suit user habits and preferences (character and GUI interfaces, Excel front-end, Web presentations,...)
DSS-OLAP: a company oriented multidimensional DBMS. It is equipped for all problems that are typical of a company environment: budget, consolidation, currency conversion, controllership, market analysis, cost allocation, ...
Direct use, reliability, transparent operation. Large data volumes, complex data structures, sophisticated computations.
Windows
Modular back-end and front-end structure. Database sharing via any LAN. Data import from traditional flat files, DBMS, spreadsheets.
Interpreter mediated dialogue. Several open-ended specialized languages (for topics like computation, set operations, queries,...) User views are any grouping of logical dimensions on lines, columns and pages. Rich report generation options (including XML, HTML and LaTeX). Extensive paper documentation.
A field-tested product with over 200 references
TANGRAM (formerly code-named HELM) has been adopted by over 200 companies, in the most diverse fields.
Codework has been involved in the majority of these DSS projects.
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Ages Spa, Santena (Torino) |
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Azienda Trasporti Consorziati, Bologna |
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Banca CRT, Torino |
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Bayer Spa, Milano |
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BPD, Difesa e Spazio, Colleferro (Roma) |
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Centrale del Latte di Torino Spa |
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Compagnia Italiana di Abbigliamento Torino |
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Descam, Lazzate (Milano) |
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Ego Italiana Spa, Novara |
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FIAT CIEI Spa, Torino |
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FIAT Lubrificanti, Villastellone (Torino) |
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FL France, Trappes (France) |
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Flexider Spa, Torino |
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Gilardini Spa, Torino |
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Magneti Marelli Iberica S.A., Canovelles (Spain) |
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Motofides Spa, Livorno |
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Satti Spa, Consorzio Trasporti Torinesi, Torino |
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SDR Spa, Torino |
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Sepa Spa, Torino |
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Sepi Spa, Torino |
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Situbsa S.A., Santpedor (Spain) |
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Tecnocar Spa, Torino |
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Telea Marelli Spa, Pero (Milano) |
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Telexis srl, Torino |
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Tutela Lubrificantes S.A., Belo Horizonte (M.G., Brasil) |
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Unicredit Bank SpA, Bologna |
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Unicredit Private Banking Spa, Torino |
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Whitehead Spa, Livorno |
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