Wednesday, November 25, 2009

There ought to be good money in reporting software

The thing about working in a large company is that there are lots of meetings. It's unimaginable how many meetings there are. We have meetings for general office announcements, a meeting for one sub group, then there are other meetings for other sub-groups, other meetings for managers and etc.

In my situation, I am working on a project that has implications to a few other teams and thus it becomes necessary to attend several other meetings to keep everyone abreast of what is going on. The problem is that once you start attending many meetings, the time to make presentation material starts eating into time that could have been used for me to get real work done.

Things for me are starting to move out of the research to the development phase, which means that the work we do is starting to be come more standardized and more focused more on making incremental improvements instead of radical changes. For me, this means generally carrying out the same experiments with slightly different conditions to try and find the perfect parameters to make what we're building. There is a crap load of data that needs to be taken, plotted and then thrown into a power point presentation and that does take up a considerable amount of time.

I've already managed to cut down some of that time to automate the analysis but, it seems to me that more is possible to speed things up. Specifically, if I could find a way to automate to take data and automatically make reports and presentations out of them then life would be a hell of a lot easier for me and I can imagine how software like this could be useful in similar kinds of corporate situations. There are likely companies out there that do specifically this when it comes to finances, sales, inventory tracking and more.

There are companies that do exactly this and most likely make good money by tailoring their software to their client's needs and having something like this right now, would really be a kick ass tool.

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