Profile abstract

Personal Information
Name   Thomas Schnauffer
Address   North Bondi NSW, Australia
Nationality   German
Education
    University of ULM, Studies in Business Mathematics
Master of Mathematics and Economics
Career
Freelance Germany 1 year   Web sites, HTML Programming

 

Employment, Germany, 2.5 years   Start up company in OLAP Technology
Product Manager and Consultant, Quality Management, Managing OEMs, Product Management, Consulting
International Development and Presales Consultant, Trainings (USA, Korea, Austria, Tunisia, Italy), internal organizational projects and CRM

 

Freelance, Germany, 3 years   Business Analyst and Software developer
  • Construction Management and Information System
    MS SQL & ASP/Intranet
  • Sales Analysis and Financial Reporting
    MS SQL Data Warehouse, ETL, MS OLAP, MIS onVision, ASP/Intranet
  • Sales Controlling and Financial Reporting
    MS SQL Data Warehouse, ETL, MS OLAP, ASP/Intranet, MIS Plain Windows Clients
  • Controlling
    MS SQL, MS OLAP, ETL, ASP/Intranet, MIS Plain
  • Internal Cost Analysis
    MIS Alea, MS Access
  • Internal Rapport System
    VB, MS Excel, MS Access
  • Sales Reporting Solution
    MS SQL, MS OLAP, ASP/Internet
  • Key Performance Indication Scorecard System
    MS SQL, VB/COM, ASP/Intranet
  • Financial Reporting
    MS SQL, MIS Alea, ETL
  • Sales Information Solution
    MS SQL Offline Cubes combined with an Excel-Reporting Solution as Add-On to SAP Mobile Sales Application with Data Source SAP BW
  • Controlling
    MS SQL, MIS Alea, MIS OnVision, Java, technical Project Management
  • Controlling
    MS SQL, MIS Alea
  • Development, System Integration
    MIS Alea, MS Access, Visual Basic Automation, HTTPS, Encryption
  • Business Charting
    MS Excel Chart on various data sources
  • Controlling for IT Department
    MIS OnVision, MIS Alea, Visual Basic Automation
  • Sales Reporting
    MIS OnVision

 

Employment, Australia, 2 years   Principal Consultant Performance Management
  • Business Intelligence for HR departments, sales departments, finance departments, production
  • OLAP
  • Automation
  • Programming (VB, VB.NET)
  • MS SQL Server
  • Project Management

 

Employment, Australia, 8 years   System Analyst and Developer, Development Manager
  • Business Intelligence for Revenue Calculation, Recovery of On Costs, Sales Reporting,
  • Management of development team
  • OLAP
  • Automation
  • Programming (VB, VB.NET, TCL)
  • Applix TM1, Oracle
  • Jira, Sharepoint

 

Consultancy, Australia, 0.5 years   Developer, Development Manager, Data Manager
  • Business Intelligence for Property
  • Management of development team
  • OLAP
  • Automation
  • Programming (VB, VB.NET, TCL)
  • Applix TM1, Oracle
  • Data Governance and Data Management
  • Data lineage

 

Languages
English   fluent
French   average (5-year of school, one project in french speaking country)
Japanese   little knowledge
Hobbies
    Music, Design (Furniture, Architecture), Travel, Reading, Computer Systems, Motor cycles

 
 

Project Abstracts

OLAP Reporting

Web Based Reporting Application/Excel Based Reporting Application

The example is a combination of 2 solutions developed for 2 clients.
The core is a meta data database in Microsoft SQL Server which stores queries against both OLAP and relational databases. The applications are a web site on one hand and a full client with integration into Microsoft Excel on the other, which combines the queries to reports and provides lightweight reporting for OLE DB (OLAP and relational) databases.
Since I had be working both with MDX as the OLAP query language and reporting solutions based on OLAP databases, I had already an idea of creating a lightweight client application using a relational database as a meta data storage and a web server based application for creating HTML reports.


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The report engine itself is based on three core tables for the report definition.  The main section contains general information about the report like title, visibility in the menu structure etc.  Other sections contain information about data area, selections and navigation.  
Variables within the queries allow to configure the queries based on the selections.

The following screen show the resulting report.


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Drill downs are available and selections can be stored in a "favourite" section.

The rich client then in use provided a much more flexible report design and functionality, with limitations to the clients' grids' row capabilities.
The following two screens show another sample report with the selection section in a VB form.


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The rich client is implemented as DLL plugins for Microsoft Excel.


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A separate administration application for the report design and the system management was also developed in VB as well.

Standalone ETL and Reporting Application

This project was originally proposed by the customers' external SAP development team as standard Excel VBA programming for integration into the SAP Sales application. Text files with report data from SAP Business Warehouse are stored in the sales managers local Microsoft SQL Server installation. These files contained the raw data for reporting.
The concept includes the following components:

  • creation of the SAP reports in a table format for further processing containing all relevant information required for the reporting on the data
  • extraction of the data in the text files from the Microsoft SQL Server blobs
  • process the extracted data into OLAP Cubes
  • generate reports from the OLAP Cubes

The next charts clarify the integration of the components.
The SAP solution is defined by a client application using a local database. The content is replicated.

Next and overview of the integration of the software developed.

This reporting solution is based on the following technology:

  • Application DLLs for integration into Microsoft Excel which also was to be the user front end
  • 2 XML files, one for processing configuration and one for the reports
  • Microsoft OLAP offline cubes which are part of the Microsoft Excel functionality and there contained in the Microsoft Pivot Table component (Active X Data Object for OLAP).
  • Reports based on MDX technology within Microsoft Excel

The first screen one shows 2 data areas (for a given customer a header section and a data section).


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The second report shows the expansion of one data area using the build in drill down functionality for the dimension structure.


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The last report shows a selection element with a double click on the dimension browser.


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