Hewlett Packard Case Study

Sales Forecasting System

Company Profile

Hewlett Packard is a leading global provider of computing and imaging solutions and services with more than 540 sales and support offices and distribution partners worldwide in over 120 countries.

Business Requirements

Hewlett Packard cover Europe, Israel and South Africa from their Bracknell office in the UK which means a considerable amount of information must be collated to produce sales forecast details across these regions. When combined with a move to a Microsoft software standard, the company was faced with an extremely complex project.

The previous way to submit quota proposals involved negotiations between the business users, who then submitted their proposals to a contact in Geneva. This contact then consolidated the information received and entered the data into a TM1 database. Intensive editing of the worksheet, manual calculations and considerable intervention increased the scope for human error. There was also no formal audit tracking process available. A standard spreadsheet could not scale up to this task since HP handles data for around 30 countries worldwide, across 2 sales forces and supporting 40 product lines.

The requirement was to develop an Intranet approach with a browser and which required no user configuration. Other key requirements were to introduce security levels for varying degrees of user access, with 4 or 5 super-users to administer access and security rights to the system. HP also required a facility to enable the administrator to 'lock' the data within the system at designated times in order to prevent updates to the data once deadlines have been reached. This would prevent ‘retrospective' editing of the sales forecasts.

Our Solution

As the Excel Spreadsheet product was not sufficiently scalable, Beacon developed a multi-purpose spreadsheet application using Tidestone's Formula One system. This system enables developers to embed spreadsheet functionality within their projects rather than rely on external applications such as Excel on users desktops. Due to its defined and documented role as a component, Formula One provided more control of the spreadsheets within their applications, saved development time over building a spreadsheet from scratch, and provided a lightweight solution which could be easily deployed.

In order to allow efficient data access, we developed a COM component using Visual Basic to retrieve and update data in the SQL Server database. To further improve speed and remove the need for Excel Office automation, XML was used for communication between the Formula One control and the server. Additional client-side validation was enabled through JavaScript.