The Controller of a manufacturing company receives a report exported from their ERP system. It arrives as a .txt file that is easy enough to read for a human (even though it contains 10’s of thousands of rows), but when he tries to analyze the information he finds that the data does not port well into a spreadsheet or other tool for analysis. There are inconsistent field lengths, no identifiable field delimiters except multiple spaces, one field has text that spans multiple lines, there are total and sub-total rows, and other rows of unnecessary information.

A FreeSight solution was created in an hour. Now the Controller needs only to drop the .txt file into FreeSight, whereupon the file is cleaned immediately, automatically. All data is separated into fields in a table, all extraneous data is removed, and what remains is a clean table ready for any type of analysis. Better still, now that this solution was created, he can use it over and over again every time he receives this report.

Our customer estimates this operation would have taken a person well experienced with spreadsheets and formulas over 30 hours to complete using spreadsheet functions and formulas. Now it takes only as much time as to drop a new .txt file into FreeSight, ie. a few seconds.