Juddmonte Racing is a thoroughbred breeder and kept many records on its racing and breeding stock on both spreadsheets and Word documents. This information was costly to maintain and virtually impossible to analyse. This information covered the pedigree family tree, conformation notes, racing successes and training history. One of the things we discovered analysing the data was incorrect pedigree data in some documents. By storing all this information in a database model we were able to remove inconsistencies, as the parents of a horse were only stored in one place, rather than in every document in which that horse appeared. We were able to present data easily in a number of different reports, analyse race results and look at the results of potential breeding programmes. All this would have been very difficult, if not impossible in the old system.

Knightsbridge Information Services run a number of Fund of Funds investment programmes. The administration of these funds was carried out on multiple spreadsheets. Functions performed were valuation of investment portfolio, management of shareholder register, monitoring cash and on-going charges, calculation of administration and advisor fees and ultimately working out a net asset value per share. This was a time consuming and laborious process that was error prone, entailed a lot of duplication and required large amounts of data being copied over from one month’s sheet to the next. Designkey analysed their requirements and created a robust database driven application that required single entry of data and automatically rolled each month’s data onto the next. The improvement in efficiency was so great that Knightsbridge Information Services were very rapidly able to expand the number of funds under management from 5 to 50, with very little increase in administrative overheads. This also enabled to administration staff to spend more time on creative tasks that would benefit the business.

Humberts Leisure managed the valuation of a portfolio of leisure properties. Each property’s annual valuation was conducted on a separate spreadsheet and the results merged onto a master spreadsheet. This was not very scaleable and required a lot of work every time another property was added to the portfolio. The spreadsheets were very prone to error with formulae being overwritten or copied incorrectly and there was a lot of data duplication. We proposed a solution that stored all the required information in a database and used a single template spreadsheet that could be locked for security once the calculation process was set up correctly. The template was fed with the data for each property and the valuation figures calculated and fed back into the database. The data was then readily available for reporting purposes and year on year comparisons. The easy of use of the new system enabled Humberts Leisure to take on another portfolio and expand the existing one, with no increase in work load.

The general principle to come out of these projects are that spreadsheets are very flexible and user friendly, but they do not scale very effectively to handling larger amounts of data. This is where our database solutions combine the flexibility and ease of use of spreadsheets with the power of storing information in a database. The end results are better control, less errors and rapid rise in efficiency and the ability to rapidly expand business without a huge increase in work load.