SEEDA have used BDC Meta Man and the Business Data Catalog to save countless hours in delivering reports and keeping tabs on all their projects.
SEEDA is wholly focused on supporting economic development in the South East. Economic growth brings regeneration and enables people and places to grow and ultimately to build their futures. To achieve growth they work at the strategic level – through partnerships in the public and private sectors – and manage practical programmes to support businesses, champion innovation and drive global competitiveness. SEEDA currently employs more than 400 people.
With the South East region being heavily populated with businesses, the number of projects they were managing was increasing. It was decided that they needed to ‘clean up’ their processes to ensure that all the data was accurate and up to date. They were using Excel spreadsheets to create reports on any projects that had incomplete data. All this data had been transferred over to SharePoint. Russell Sivalingam said "We did this so we can report in SharePoint to see which projects needed attention, we wanted to create an application to show us what projects were on the go, who was the project manager, what they have to do, what’s there and what’s not there."
It was decided that by making use of Microsoft SQL Server and the Business Data Catalog they could store all of this data and present it in SharePoint dashboards.
“I started using the BDC application Definition Editor which Microsoft provides, it’s not the easiest to use and it’s not just drag and drop, it’s drag and drop then a couple of clicks and a couple of more configurations and if you re lucky it works. What I wanted was something that could easily get this done and not be a bother."
After some research on the internet, they found BDC Meta Man. It was easy to use, quick and reliable.
“I think the write-back feature is very good in that it doubles the power of SharePoint. It’s not only a tool to reach data but also to interact with it, which I’ve found very useful and we’ve launched a couple of applications created using BDC Meta Man.”
The Benefits
When they were using Excel to generate these reports, it was taking up to a week with a lot of man hours spent crunching in the figures. With SharePoint and the dashboard and applications created using BDC Meta Man, it now takes seconds. Not only does BDC Meta Man save them time creating the ADF Files (around 5 developer days per file), it continues to save time and money each time a report is run. This allows SEEDA to run reports more frequently, thus ensuring that all their projects are kept up to speed.