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 :)

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 :)

Spam. Crisis. Spam, spam, spam, spa.....

Beep! Hi!

Sorry for the delay in updating our blog. Too many events happen nowadays. First of all, this is the economical crisis. Since the advertising and marketing department of our company (in my face) is located in Russia, I myself see how this crisis impacts the advertising budgets. Many companies started to reduce them, they ask 40-50% discounts and postpone the approval of the budgets to Spring.

Second, our blog is exposed to spam attacks. :) We already hardly distinguish between men and robots! Therefore, if you are a man write "BEEP!" in your comment! ;) In this way we will deceive the foul robots! :D

All the best wishes from YellowRiver,
Alex

BOM (Bill Of Materials) in EXCEL

Hi,

today we would like to present our new project for small and medium enterprises - BOM or Bill Of Materials. This is a tool implemented in Excel that laves you all the flexibility of Excel itself and adds some additional funcionality to manage your bill of materials.

Each of your products can be split into its components and primary materials, out of which your product cost and production time derive.

Now that the solution is in Excel you can easily create your BOM hierarchies and calculate precisely the time and the cost for the production of your products. In addition, we also realized the function for fixed cost allocation based on the production time allocation driver.

Find below the demonstration video of the alfa version of the tool:


Feel free to send us your comments, ideas, proposals and suggestions. We are always happy to receive any feedback from you.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Currently busy with...

Hi guys,

these days we are a little bit inactive on our blog. It seems to me that the economical crisis impacted even on our activities. Now we have to do more to maintain the levels of income as a year before. :) So, we are a little bit busy with projects.

So, since I am the representative of the IT part I will tell you in brief what I do. Then maybe on week-end we will have the report from Alex who represents creative design part. :)

Today there will be just text, no videos, no images... We are in design and development process.

Well, there are several projects that I am currently busy with at my primary work place. The first one is the application to manage order and sales simulations. Before the company we do the project for extensively used "unmanaged" Excel spreadsheets. Why unmanaged? Because every single simulation was created manually on four sheets with huge amount of information. Now that we work with SAP BPC (ex Outlooksoft) we keep on working in Excel but now every single sheet is 100% managed! :) B-)
So now we automate at maximum the process of simulation! :) All the data are stored in a central database, Excel becomes as a user interface to access the data in a correct way. :) The user makes selections of products, product types, production sites etc., get automatically generated templates for data input, inputs data with all the necessary data validation controls, the data is then passed to SPSS for optimization and returned to the user for eventual modifications.

The other project is the application to manage the company's where I work internal budget. This is quite a standard project also done by means of SAP BPC. Here the particular feature is that we are trying to overcome some natural limits of SAP BPC to create flexible applications.

And the last small project (small compared to the previous two, but not less important) is the creation of web-services and components to use in Excel to make it programmatically easily communicate with them. Very often our clients ask us to provide some interface to manage some simple tasks on the server like database optimization, update, file launch, data report etc. So, we traditionally provide interfaces based on Excel and program it to easily communicate with the web-services.
Therefore, if you have some applications and you want to stay in touch with them even when you are away (not away from Internet though) we will be able to help you. :)

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Slide progress bar UPDATE

Hi,

today we would like to announce about the release of an updated version of the SlideProgressBar for PowerPoint. B-)

Here is the original link to the explanation of what this solution is about. :)
http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/02/power-point-slide-progress-bar.html

We also introduced some support for shape filling and line dashing. Actually, now you can build slide progress bar in many variations using gradient filling, dashed lines, various line weights etc.
What you have to do is to create any shape (let's say, a rectangle), change its properties (line weight, line style, color etc.), select the option DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS and click OK.

Watch the example:


Here you see that the line became dashed, styled as double line and the fill effects were set to a vertical shading style of two colors (the colors themselves are not important since you are to define them).

Pay attention that the flag DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS is checked.

All the modifications to the default shape will be reflected in the newly built progress bars. :)

When you rebuild the bars you will see the result of your modifications:

(the fill type is gradient, the lines are dashed and double) :)

We actually build slide progress bars even for Office 2003 styled as Office 2007 making them more robust and beautiful. :)

Enjoy! :)

As usual, you can download the add-in
from our web-site www.yriver.it
(PPT_SlideProgressBar.exee [you've to change the extension from .EXEE to .EXE since this is a self-extracting WinRAR archive])
in the category OUR PROJECTS.

Field exploration!!!

Check out a new view on the "space" exploration!!!



Alex