Apart from problem-solving, the Spreadsheet Doctor also provides a service in bespoke spreadsheets. These can vary greatly, but are often very simple, taking anything from less than a day up to a week to produce. They are designed to be easy to use and are accompanied by full instructions.
He was asked to propose a spreadsheet booking system for holiday villas. To support the proposal, an outline system was created that enabled an enquirer's personal and travel details to be recorded and the progress of the enquiry to be tracked. The system also allowed the source of the enquiry to be recorded, villa availability to be checked, occupancy to be optimised and each customer’s records to be saved and recalled as required.
"Stephen listened to our needs very carefully, making me confident that these needs were fully understood. He then responded very promptly with a system that we could demonstrate to our clients. I would not hesitate to instruct Stephen again." Judith Ludovino, TelePA, www.telepa.co.uk
A Progress Tracker was built for a local company in 6.25 hours of effort. It includes a detailed sheet for each client; a Control sheet with one-touch buttons for adding and removing clients; an Index page with details of the progress of each client's business and a navigation button to go to the client's detail sheet; a Task List showing the current status of each task and the consultant handling it; an archive system for ensuring that each day's records are securely saved.
"With an ever increasing number of clients, keeping tabs on the progress of solutions is clearly important. Working through a tailored solution in spreadsheet form allows us to tailor and modify the system before automating within our back office database system.” – Tim Johnson, Operations Director,www.debtDr.co.uk
A stochastic model was built for analysing the number of aircraft that would be available for operations under varying operational requirements, maintenance regimes and fault rates. The user was able to manipulate the input data to study a range of what-if scenarios. This was just over 1 day's work.
"This work proved to be exactly what our end user required and he was very pleased with the flexibility it gave him. An excellent piece of work that was delivered on time and to budget." Anthony Kent Associates
A tool was needed for forecasting the next month's revenue for a company with a highly volatile order book. The output gave not only the best estimate of the revenue level but also the 80% and 95% confidence intervals within which the revenue could be expected to fall. This was 1 week's work, including the initial analysis of the order book, creation of the analysis method and generation of the spreadsheet solution.
