Business Intelligence Tool Tableau Rated Favorably by Gartner
Every year, Gartner creates a report reviewing major market and industry trends for Business Intelligence and Analytics. This year Tableau was listed as a leader for the first time in their magic quadrant.
SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence Pointers and Designing Dashboards
As a software consultant, I am always learning novel ways to create dashboards and data visualizations that provide value to my clients. SharePoint 2013 provides a valuable framework for surfacing business intelligence applications; it’s up to the consultant to shape those dashboards into tools that can convey data, information and knowledge that is timely and […]
Agile Development Methodology Adoption Grows, Management Has No Idea What It Does
A recent survey on Agile development methodology reported adoption is on the climb. This is great news, but typically we find that executive management teams have no idea what Agile is, or what it’s supposed to accomplish. From my time at Entrance and in previous positions, this is definitely consistent with my experience. I’d like to […]
SharePoint: The Tool Oil and Gas is Missing Out On
Everyone seems to agree that the talent or generation gap in oil and gas is one of the largest worries facing the industry today. The energy industry is booming and their biggest worry according to NPR among others is that “the oil industry can’t find enough new workers to replace an aging workforce.” In fact, […]
Message Router for MVVM
A frequent problem when using the MVVM (Model View ViewModel) pattern is how to send messages to an object far away in the object graph. For example- a view model for the main window opens a detail area (or popup window) backed by a detail view model. The detail view model doesn’t know how it is […]
Components of a Business Intelligence Solution: Part 3
This is week three of a series covering the different components of a business intelligence solution. Get caught up on part one, covering data integration, and part two, covering data cubes and analytics, now! As I discussed the first week, it’s very important to understand how all the pieces of business intelligence work together to […]
Entrance Launches Lunch and Learn Series
In addition to providing awesome custom software development and SharePoint consulting services, Entrance has made it a goal to share our knowledge with customers so they can learn from our experience. As a result, for 2013, we have launched a new lunch and learn series to further this purpose. Each month we will cover a […]
Use Custom Software to Toss Those Time-Intensive Tasks Aside
You may not realize it, but employees at your company are probably wasting time on tasks a custom software solution could perform for them. For one Entrance client in particular, winning a big contract with a large oil and gas company meant a new process for invoicing had to be developed. The customer required that […]
SharePoint Utilization Makes a Difference for ROI
SharePoint is an investment for your company. If you don’t think of it that way, consider the difference it can make for business collaboration, document management, compliance and more. A recent survey says that SharePoint is being utilized by 86.3% of companies with 5000 employees or more. But end user satisfaction is only about 50%. So where is […]
What is a custody transfer?
Custody Transfer In the oil & gas industry, custody transfer refers to the transactions involving transporting physical product from one operator to another. Examples would include petroleum between tanks & tankers, tankers and ships, or platform to barge, railcar or truck. Custody transfer in fluid measurement is defined as a metering point where fluid is […]
Rodeo Run Fun
Entrance participated in the ConocoPhillips Rodeo Run this past Saturday. We all had a great time, with some employees doing the 5k and some the 10k. Nearly 15,000 people participated, raising $400,000 for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Educational Fund.
Windows Service Development Trick
Windows Services are a bit of a pain to develop. They can’t be run through the debugger, and by default they can’t be run on the command line either. They have to be installed and then run. When debugging, you have to install the service, restart the service, and then attach the debugger. Ouch. (I […]
Components of a Business Intelligence Solution: Part 2
I started a series last week on what a business intelligence solution should look like. Part one covered integration and the data warehouse. This week, I’d like to cover data cubes and analytics. Mining Your Data For Awesome Business Intelligence
Packaging Document Set Content Types for SharePoint
I ran into some problems today when attempting to package and deploy a custom Document Set content type in SharePoint. This had negative side effects that carried over to other areas of my solution, and I’d like to save other users from running into this issue!
Oil and Gas Software the Key to Optimizing Industry Growth
I’ve discussed in a previous post the impact that the oil and gas industry has on jobs in the United States. I took note this past week of an article in the Oil and Gas Financial Journal regarding the testimony of Daniel Yergin (author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World) to the US […]
Software Consulting in the Real World
Entrance prides itself on fostering an environment of learning for all of our employees, so we have recently started a monthly brown bag lunch sessions where our consultants take turns sharing knowledge and best practices with their co-workers. For this first event, I led a discussion on developing software in less than ideal conditions. To […]
Electronic Data Exchange System Saves Entrance Client Headcount
Data entry and client invoicing can be very time consuming and often takes up more bandwidth than a company would like for such a menial task. Entrance implemented an electronic data interchange system (EDI) for one client, who had a large customer with very specific invoice format requirement, in order simplify this process and enable time savings that have resulted […]
Improved Timesheet Reporting with One Simple Fix
One of our most successful projects is for a client called TG Mercer. We created a pipeline logistics system for them that automates the tracking and management of their inventory for its entire lifecycle. Entrance recently released an update to TG Mercer to improve their reporting capabilities through improvements to their timesheet process. TG Mercer […]
Entrance at the Rice Career Fair
Entrance loves that our employees are super smart, fun people. And because our growing company is always in need of good developers, we participated in the Rice Career Fair this past week. While hiring locally is great, we also try to stay involved at Rice because most of our management, and many employees, are alumni.
Components of a Business Intelligence Solution: Part 1
There are many different technical frameworks available for implementing a business intelligence solution, all offered by a variety of vendors. In a general sense though, there are three overarching pieces to business intelligence: Integration and the data warehouse Data cubes and analytics Dashboards, KPI’s and reports Understanding these pieces and how they work in tandem to address […]
