Hello and welcome to our latest Blog Post.

Thank you very much for dropping by, we really appreciate you!

In this Blog entry we will share with you a recent customer success story.

The customer is a long term client of a former Metaphor user who provides financial advice for the customer.

When the customer wanted to improve their financial closing capabilities the former Metaphor user contacted Meta5 because of his previous experience with the Metaphor software.

We were able to explain that we were able to provide similar software that he had used in the 1990s.

We were able to explain that in addition we could provide the Meta5 Workbench to build the ETL and underlying data models for Meta5 to query.

The proposed project to the customer was for the former Metaphor user to provide the services to work closely with the customers finance people and to build the reports and dashboards needed.

Meta5 provided the services to extract data from Infor FACTS, build the staging area, build the data warehouse, and build the ETL needed to send updated data from Infor FACTS to the Staging Area and Data Warehouse.

The Meta5 Workbench is also responsible for the daily running and management of all ETL and Meta5 Capsules to create all reports ready for the business people when they arrive at work in the morning.

 

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Customer Background

 

Industry: Distribution of Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning Parts (HVAC)

Approximate Revenue: Between USD10M and USD20M per annum.

ERP: Infor FACTS

Reporting: FACTS Reports plus downloading to Excel.

 

Major Issues:

1. Poor reporting options provided by FACTS.
2. Lack of understanding of the FACTS data and the database.
3. Inability to close easily books on a regular basis.
4. Inability to use data in FACTS to improve business performance.

 

Major Needs:

1. Ability to easily close books each month.
2. Develop understanding of core areas of data in the Infor FACTS ERP.
3. Make all core data areas visible to end users and able to be reported and analysed in Excel. (All business users use Excel.)
4. Develop a suite of base reports focused on financials.
5. Enable end user query and analysis to be able to answer “just thought of” business questions.

 

Major Metrics:

1. Tables in Infor FACTS: 650+
2. Fields in Infor FACTS: 14,000+
3. Tables in Staging Area: 650+ (FACTS Replicated)
4. Fields in Staging Area: 14,000+ (FACTS Replicated)
5. Fact Tables in DWH 1.0: 35.
6. Dimension Tables in DWH 1.0: 105. (Date Tables Replicated)
7. Data Fields Mapped FACTS to DWH: 2000+
8. Fact/Dimension Table Lookup Connections Created: 380+

 

Subject Areas Mapped:

1. General Ledger
2. Accounts Receivable
3. Accounts Payable
4. Inventory Control
5. Sales Orders
6. Purchase Orders

 

Reporting Areas Covered:

1. Profit And Loss
2. Balance Sheet
3. Cash Flow

 

Major Achievements:

1. Ability to easily close books each month.
2. Data in Subject Areas Mapped well understood.
3. All data in Infor FACTS visible in Meta5 from Staging Area.
4. Daily ETL runs at 2am sending all updated data into Staging/DWH.
5. All data in DWH visible in Meta5.
6. All data able to be queried and reported on via Meta5+Excel.
7. Suite of base reports completed.
8. Reports + Dashboards development ongoing.

 

Work Weeks For component development:

1. Staging Area: 1 week
2. Data Warehouse + ETL Development: 6 weeks
3. Reports + Dashboards: 6 weeks + ongoing

 

Technologies Used:

1. Excel 365 for Reporting and Dashboards.
2. Meta5 Enterprise Edition for Report Development.
3. Meta5 WorkBench for DataModels and ETL.
4. SQL Server 2016 for Database and Report Services

 

For future clients it is expected the work weeks will be less as we now have the base models for the “Subject Areas Mapped”.

Pricing for this customer: Confidential as they were a development partner.

 

Pricing for future customers:

1. Will depend on negotiations.
2. We will offer fixed price and Time and Materials Pricing options.

 

Materials We Can Provide For More Details:

1. We can go through the actual data models implemented.
2. We can show you empty examples of reports.

 

Notes:

1. The customer reports contain confidential data.
2. We do not have a system of “Test Data”.

 

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Summary

In summary, a former Metaphor user, who had a very good experience of Metaphor, was faced with a client who needed a new way of closing the books faster and more easily than their current processes.

The customer was using Infor FACTS and had been using it for many years.

The former Metaphor user felt that if Metaphor was still around then it might well be that it could help with this problem.

Much to the former Metaphor users surprise he found us here at Meta5 and we explained that all the old software he knew was still there along with many more features and functions.

We explained that in addition to the Meta5 software we could also provide the Meta5 Workbench to build the ETL and underlying data models for Meta5 to query.

This was all enough for our old customer to recommend a project to his client to build the data warehouse end to end with him leading the project and owning the relationship with the customer.

The project went more smoothly than we had expected.

We had expected a lot more problems in figuring out how Infor FACTS worked to be able to create the mappings to the data warehouse.

Infor FACTS turned out to be quite standard. There were a surprisingly small number of issues in the development cycle for the underlying data warehouse.

Given we have now completed this development and we have a happy installed Infor FACTS customer we are pleased to be able to offer the same style of project to other Infor FACTS customers.

If you have Infor FACTS installed and you would like a shiny new BI solution for your Infor FACTS ERP?

Please contact us via the contacts page.

We would love to hear from you!

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Meta5: The Better Way

Thank you for your time and attention

Jim Kanzler.