Friday 27 February 2009

BOM - Bill Of Materials

Hi,

today we would like to tell you about our new solution that we created to provide you with a simple and available instrument to calculate the production cost of your products.

Quite often working with small “factories” we faced the situation when the factory owners could not tell us the exact production cost per unit for the goods they produced. It was a pity situation since the pricing policy is totally distorted in this case. And in addition the management had no idea about the rate of use of the resources, about inefficiencies, about additional opportunities etc.
Therefore, we created this very simple, intuitive, and powerful tool to manage the hierarchy of products – the Bill Of Materials.

By means of this tool you can:
- Define multiple parent-child relationships between your raw materials and components which are made of them (different components can be done from the same raw materials)
- Define the process time for the raw material to become the component (in minutes)
-Define the amount of raw materials needed to produce one unit of some component
- Define the acquisition cost per one unit of raw materials
- Define fixed costs (labour, energy, administrative, other) which are then allocated to the products and components based on their process time
- Visualize and navigate the hierarchy of your materials
o Drill down
o Drill up
o Refresh
o Display only raw materials
o Redisplay all
- Change the visualization mode from table to hierarchy (or tree) with different indentation types per elements

Below you can see the working example of the BOM application:



The application is freely available on our web-site WWW.YRIVER.IT in the chapter OUR PROJECTS where you can also find out how else we can make Excel work for you.
Download it BOM.ZIP.
Feel free to contact us if you have any ideas, suggestions and proposals.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Sunday 22 February 2009

Permeability of soils – the Excel application

Hi,

Today we would like to introduce you one of our projects that we did for Politecnic University of Insubria. This is an Excel application that helps calculating the permeability of soils.

"Why in Excel?" you might ask. Excel is a powerful and flexible framework to create applications with dynamic interfaces. In this project we needed to implement the tool to manage different points that took measures of different parameters of soils. Their particular feature is that each point is characterised by a variable number of discontinuity families. Therefore, one point had to expose an interface to input data in 3 families, the other one – in 15 families, yet another one – in 35 families etc.
At first we were requested to develop a stand-alone application. However, after having thought carefully of the problem we offered to develop the application in Excel.

Here are the advantages in using Excel:
- Familiar and simple user interface (it’s Excel itself)
- Open code (yep, Excel with its native VBA support provides us with a possibility to create applications with open code; the University, in turn, wanted to have the possibility to control and modify any time the business logic of the application)
- Ease in creation of a beautiful and dynamic interface (one point has k discontinuity families, each has a number of parameters for input, but that also serve as output parameters, k! angles between families to input and output, k ^ 2 interconnection values for discontinuity families and k hydraulic conductivity values per each point – and this all dynamic and on a single worksheet)
- Fast development (Excel is already a powerful tool which we only enhance with our advanced functions. Anyway, 50% of all the work has already been done by Microsoft)
- Data and application in one place (Excel application can be a calculation engine and a database in the same time)
- Flexibility in distribution and power of management (if you want to change the year and archive your database or switch to another measurement area or start new measurement period you have to simply create a copy of the workbook)

Below you can see how the application works:



Visit our web-site WWW.YRIVER.IT to see other projects, solutions, ideas and find out more about how we can make Excel work for you.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)