"The process of creating a new report is at least five times faster." — Michael Bjerregaard Pedersen, Senior Software Engineer
Collaboration and management firm Byggeweb (known as Docia abroad and formerly as Backbone Digital Systems) develops products for the building and construction industry. Founded in 1997, the Danish company offers the Docia product. Docia enables all parties involved in building construction, including owners, architects, and contractors, to work together via the Internet. Docia contains the CoreFM component, a highly visual, Web-based program that offers users a comprehensive range of tools for managing multiple buildings and takes full advantage of architectural drawings.
Docia contains a repository of information, including building plans, construction materials, maintenance instructions, a contact database, supplier data, and more. Users of the Docia program can access this data and connect it to relevant architectural drawings.
But Byggeweb had to generate reports on a case-by-case basis, which was a time-consuming process. Plus, Byggeweb wanted to be able to offer customized report layouts to individual customers.
Byggeweb (Docia) is a leading provider of digital tools for project and facility management in the the construction industry. Solutions span all stages of the building process including idea, design,tenders and building, overview of deficiencies,and operating and maintaining properties.
Byggeweb began evaluating various reporting systems to solve its reporting dilemma. The company looked at a couple of high-priced packages but soon realized their cost far outweighed their benefits. Then Byggeweb discovered Windward.
Windward’s primary benefit is that it is both quick and simple to design report templates. Users design report templates in Microsoft® Word, Excel®, or PowerPoint®, where they control layout, font, and formatting. Windward allows the user to create a wide variety of reports simply by choosing what data to include and when to run the report.
Users can generate reports in a wide range of formats, including PDF, Word, HTML, Excel spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentation, and a powerful reporting engine backs the template design process’ ease-of-use.
“Implementing Windward was very straightforward,” said Michael Bjerregaard Pedersen, Senior Software Engineer, who was responsible for implementing Windward at Byggeweb. He explained:
“The added benefit of being able to create individually designed templates for each report for each customer is the best argument for separating layout and data, and it saves us a lot of time, both short term and long term.”
One Byggeweb programmer does the implementation and creates the first template for each report. Another, non-technical employee then takes the template and enhances the report layout for individual customers.
Docia users now can call up a report at any instant or schedule reports to run on their own timetables: hourly, daily, weekly or in another time frame. Docia has the ability to quickly generate reports that are returned directly to the user onscreen, stored in an archive for later retrieval, or mailed to the end user. Another advantage to Windward is that it is capable of allowing the user to insert images into a report on the fly, a key feature in an extremely visual product such as Docia.
Thanks to Windward, Byggeweb cut down on time spent creating reports by a factor of five.
“Compared to systems where both layout and data must be coded, as we did before, the process of creating a new report is at least five times faster,” Pedersen said.
“I would recommend Windward to other companies,” Pedersen added. “Not just because it is a nice product, but also because the Windward technical support team listens to customers’ needs and responds very fast.”
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