Schematiq

Schematiq Review

Vorteile:

The automated side of this product is the biggest benefit for me. Monthly models can be automatically calculated which really helps improve the efficiency of reporting

Nachteile:

The one feature which I would add to the software is an approximate calculating time - i.e. how long each calculation has left to take (similar to Excel calculation)

A shot in the arm for Excel

Kommentare: Schematiq has been great to work with. The HTI team (creators of schematiq) have been incredibly responsive to questions, worked with us to resolve problem, been professional and great to work alongside.

Vorteile:

Schematiq gives the ability to create powerful APIs without the need to write lots of code or even transfer business knowledge to software engineers. The ability for a business expert to transform their logic and know how into an API without larges amounts of IT input has sped up development at least 4 or 5 times.

Nachteile:

More integration with Azure AD and security aspects but I know these are on the road map and some were addressed even during our development with this tool. A enterprise/volume licensing model would be very useful.

Very good when it works, but there are some difficulties. Thankfully, it works most of the time

Kommentare: it's absolutely fanstastic for smaller projects as it's ability to manipulate the data in tables and usefulness when working within data warehouse makes works very speedy However, if a document is heavily based on schematiq, and requires it to handle a lot of data, it can be very slow to work. Overall, I had a very good experience and despite it's flaws, it still allows us to build models and carry out processes faster than without it.

Vorteile:

The Assistant is probably one of the best features in schematiq - it really speeds up working with tables

Nachteile:

Loading times can be very long and for large data projects it can get up to half an hour to even open the file Also occasionally, the tbl.download will not function properly - only downloading 100 lines of data. Addtionally there are inconsistencies - there are days when Schematiq works perfectly with no issues, but the next day, on the same file without any changes some formulae just stop working even after refreshing them multiple times.

Great Product For Large Data Analysis

Vorteile:

Working as an accountant in the Energy industry, preparing the monthly financials involves analysing/manipulating hundreds of thousands lines of data each month. These large data sets were simply becoming unmanageable in Excel alone and so the Schematic add-in has become invaluable to our month-end and year-end processes. The product allows me to store, amend and join extremely large tables of data that would normally crash Excel, and because that actual data itself is not stored within the Excel workbook it keeps file sizes to a minimum (which keeps the IT department off our backs!) I particularly like that you can import/export multiple external csv files easily, or link directly into an SQL database. This makes analysing various datasets in the one workbook really simple and eliminates the need to perform tedious "Copy and Paste" tasks. The language Schematiq uses is incredibly similar to Excel in terms of formulas, which makes learning how to use the software incredibly easy.

Nachteile:

There are no real downsides to Schematic that I have encountered so far, only a few small glitches . 1. Sometimes I would like to save a workbook without doing a full workbook calculation, as some larger models can take 15/20 mins to calculate. In normal Excel this is easy but Schematic is sometimes reluctant to let you do this straight away. 2. Sometimes the viewing pane, where tables are visible, freezes and so the add-in has to be removed and re-added to Excel to get this back. This means re-calculating the workbook which can be frustrating/time-consuming if it's a large model. Both of these are small issues in the grand scheme of things! As an accountant, most of my work is performed in SAP and Excel/Schematiq. If somehow Schematiq could be linked directly into SAP to make pulling financial data out of the system easier, that would be a really great feature.

A great tool for creating Excel-based APIs

Kommentare: Our overall experience with Schematiq has been very positive. I was initially quite skeptical about the claims that they made, for how easy their software was to use, as well as how performant and stable the resulting APIs were. We performed a carefully-evaluated pilot implementation and the results were better than I had expected - the software did everything that was claimed, was easy to use, ran quickly and is super stable. Our main use case it to implement APIs that wrap pricing models for insurance products. Schematiq is a great choice for implementing many of our models and we also found some use cases during development where it was quicker to implement a non-pricing API in Schematiq, than it would have been to implement the same API in C#. This included developing a data-driven, dynamic rules engine (including standardised error handling to check rules integrity) in under a day in Schematiq, that would have taken around 2 weeks to implement in C#. Being Excel-based, Schematiq also helps the Software Engineers to partner with our business power users, so that they can create their models using decent software engineering practices. This means that over time, we are upskilling the modelers and risk analysts to enable them to produce production-grade APIs that can be plugged into our digital delivery products. This helps reduce the cycle time and removes IT as a bottleneck, to getting important model updates delivered into our live environments swiftly.

Vorteile:

The Schematiq Workbench Excel functions are very powerful and allow a Software Engineer to take Excel development to a much more well-principled level. This includes concepts such as storing a whole table (or tree or other object) worth of data in a single cell, rather than having to deal with dynamic data ranges, etc as you often see in EUC / UDT based solutions. There is support for querying databases, converting to/from JSON, reading/writing to .csv in just a single function and many other useful features. These allowed us to implement complex pricing models in Excel in a very maintainable and understandable way, while abstracting our data off to SQL Server. Converting the inputs and outputs of the model into a REST API that offers JSON-based request/response objects was easy and quick. The resulting code runs very quickly and reliably in the Schematiq Portal product. My understanding is that under the covers, the Excel model call tree is parsed out and cross-compiled to the .NET equivalent calls. It is this compiled .NET code that gets called when the API is invoked, which means that things run very quickly as compared to native Excel formulae. I really liked the vendor support for this product too - very quick and responsive and on the occasions where I found (or thought I had found) a bug, they would partner with me to understand the issue and either show me what I was doing wrong, or if it was a genuine bug, they fixed it and set out updated code quickly

Nachteile:

The only area where I have had any difficulty with the product, is that after Microsoft Excel auto-updates, sometimes the Schematiq Workbench add-in disappears from the Excel menu. The workaround for this is quick and easy (just go and reenable Schematiq via the COM Add-in menu) and it only appears to be an issue on my development box (running 64-bit Windows Server 2016). I've not heard any of our users or other developers having this issue though (typically they are running on Windows 10), so this could be more related to my development setup - it's not been enough of an issue to cause me to investigate any further though, so that's just speculation on my part.