How Lumira Caught An Error

[Former Member]

I wish that I could put the graph in this blog, as it looks ridiculous, but it is super secret production data - so you'll have to trust me on this.

I work as a functional analyst, primarily for our sales team, and recently we have been tracking our out of stock history. Since this isn't something that will be going on forever, we have been doing it with a simple BEx broadcast that comes to my inbox every morning. That gets plonked into an excel sheet, and whamo, we have our history. (we don't hold out of stock history in our system, and have no plan to, and that's why we are doing this in such an archaic manner)

So for the past two months, I had been doing this the hard way - in excel. It would take me close to 20 minutes in the morning to re-configure all the cells for the chart, make sure the data was formatted correctly so that it would show up nicely and then emailing the charts out to the stakeholders for this temporary effort weekly. That meant that we didn't get a visual on the data until I shiuffled it together at the end of the week.

What I didn't mention is all this while I have also been working in Lumira with some other data to do a little bit of a proof of concept on how we can use it in our business.

Then - one day it hit me:

WHY AM I DOING THIS THE HARD WAY?!

I promptly slapped all the numbers in a new excel sheet, and brought it into Lumira, which formatted everything I needed and let me drag and drop all six of the metrics however I liked them.

That's when I saw it - Three days of negative numbers.

If you're thinking "Negative numbers, Noel, that shouldn't be possible in an out of stock analysis." Well, you're thinking correctly. It really shouldn't be, come to find out since this particular broadcast had some hard coding in the query that suddently made all the proper numbers, negative. (Not sure what it was as when I told the person that created it, they just fixed it, and I'm totally cool with that in this instance) To be honest, this error wouldn't have been caught until the end of the week if it hadn't been for the ease and speed that I could put the stacked bar chart togehter in Lumira, and then we would have had a week of dead data instead of 3 days.

So - Lumira saved me a boatload of reprocessing, caught an error faster then my old archaic method of reporting, and also, I just have to add numbers and click a refresh button on my data now - not mess with formulas. It's wonderful, and actually gave me enough time in my day to jot this blog - so quadruple win!