This manufacturer mass-produces electronic devices that go into cars — along with lots of quality-control and production data, says an IT pilot fish who works there.

“Our automated equipment sends data to a Microsoft SQL Server database, and the data is held for a rolling year,” fish says. “The data is queried by engineers at headquarters, which is in another state.

“But recently some of the local line supervisors decided they want to query the data to help predict trends, which would assist them in making production more efficient.”

The line supervisors tell fish what they want, and he writes a view on the data, complete with descriptive field names, and then connects the view to an Excel spreadsheet. Since the line supervisors already know Excel, that makes it easy for them to search for the data they need — it’s essentially a poor man’s reporting tool.

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