Software capabilities

Home

Ledcap has extensive experience in building software systems that integrate Excel and Access using VBA.  The advantages of integrated solutions are outlined in the examples below.

Life of Mine Trucking Requirements

Ledcap has two packages for assisting with the determination of life of mine trucking requirements.

RampBuilder
This is an Access database package that determines haul paths for each scheduling period.  It requires a schedule of block movements and master haul path routes.  The software generates period by period haul paths and the tonnage moved over the path in the period.

HaulTime
This is an Excel workbook bases package for estimating haul times over a haul path.  Users specify the haulage unit (typically truck type) and it reads the haul path files generated by RampBuilder and writes a single csv file with the distance, time, fuel consumption, period and tonnage travelled on each path.

Building these packages on Microsoft Access and Excel allows rapid development  with the extensive overhead of supporting functions provided by Microsoft.  This considerably lowers development cost and guarantees the systems ongoing availability on the ever evolving windows operating system.  RampBuilder has all Access functions available except the VBA modules.  HaulTime is an Excel add on so not Excel functionality is compromised.  A number of HaulTime tools are available as functions in Excel.

Production and business activity data collection and reporting systems

Data entry and checking in Excel - Data storage and reporting from Access.

Many smaller business have data collection and reporting systems written in Access or some other microcomputer based database management system.  Although these systems have great  flexibility when it comes to reporting the data they contain, it is much more difficult to create efficient and flexible data entry forms to enter the raw data into the system.  Poor data entry forms allow incorrect and spurious data to be entered into the system.  The cost of developing efficient data entry forms that will maintain data integrity is often the majority of the cost of developing a reporting system.

Simon Law has an off-the-shelf product for rapid development of reporting systems.  It has a data entry system built in Excel and an Access database system for automatically loading the data from the Excel workbook into Access data tables.  Advantages of this system are:

• Additional fields (columns) can be added to the Excel workbook at any time and the data entry for this new field can begin immediately.
• Very little is required to add the additional field to a pre-existing table in the database.
• The addition of a new field in a database table will not impact on current reports, thus new reports incorporating the new field can be written when time is available and the current data entry and reporting can continue unhindered by the new data field.
• Over time the system can have data entry forms added in the Access database if this is required, but during development the Excel based system can continue to provide the data entry capability with no impact on data collection.

Data manipulation

Ledcap has written numerous systems to load data and reports from a wide variety of systems, accounting and mapping, into Access and Excel for customised reporting and data analysis.

Home