When consulting for new projects, our goal is to streamline as many of the steps as practical to improve efficiency, productivity and time savings.
To obtain the project goals we need to determine the entire process surrounding the data you are working with by answering and reviewing the following questions.
Where does the data originate?
How is it accessed?
What format it is in?
What changes are needed?
What results are required?
What format is needed for the results?
Where are the results stored?
Where are the results sent?
We distinguish data from files because data may come from any of the following:
A file on disk
A database query
An email client or server
A website of sftp site
Here is a brief video about the human vs. computer time required when creating an Excel file using a typical data processing scenario. We have created hundreds of these types of projects in the finance industry.