A coworker and I took 2 weeks to write an Excel add-in that communicated to an AS/400 backend, many years ago.
I was the one to train our first customer (CFO at a carpet manufacturer), who after being shown that they could get fresh data in their spreadsheet each month by copy/pasting a column and updating the period value, physically pushed me away from the keyboard and just went to town. Turns out he was spending 2-3 days each quarter copying data over manually for his reports to the board. The ability to use Excel's charting features meant he could now get it all done in an afternoon.
That little app has now become the focus of the entire business, with versions for Lawson, Oracle Financials, and various other ERP, etc. packages, providing employment for almost 100 people.
I was the one to train our first customer (CFO at a carpet manufacturer), who after being shown that they could get fresh data in their spreadsheet each month by copy/pasting a column and updating the period value, physically pushed me away from the keyboard and just went to town. Turns out he was spending 2-3 days each quarter copying data over manually for his reports to the board. The ability to use Excel's charting features meant he could now get it all done in an afternoon.
That little app has now become the focus of the entire business, with versions for Lawson, Oracle Financials, and various other ERP, etc. packages, providing employment for almost 100 people.
I wish I'd negotiated a percentage. ;)