Djeeni

Inspiration

A lot of people at finance departments of companies or simply in an organisator/middleman function is busy with manipulating data with Excel - manually. They create the same reports every month, every week or every day by copying, filtering, consolidating data for hours and hours. Most BI solutions are simply too big and complex for them to use requiring a steep learning curve and IT skills. Djeeni wants to help these people to save their time and let them work more efficient by letting them automate these data preparation/reporting processes while they stay in Excel.

What it does

You can simply describe Djeeni how you make your report/how you prepare your data: what files you use, what data you copy, how do you consolidate or split data sets. You can describe your process like you explain it to a colleague without any IT knowledge. And by the time you finish your process description Djeeni is ready to perform it automatically on behalf of you. Faster, without errors, anytime. The most important feature of Djeeni that it does NOT require to share your data with us or anybody. You can run Djeeni processes completely isolated on your computer or local network. Look further at djeeni.com and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu82uc6SH3MUoRwI3IGWHuA .

How we built it

There is a small but very enthousiast team behind Djeeni. First we made a proof of concept purely in VBA (the programming language of Excel). This proof of concept was validated with interested would-be users. Using their feedback the final version was created in the cloud (node.js) as an SaaS solution. The development is ongoing (just as with any other SaaS platform)

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge is to keep Djeeni simple. Djeeni is the personal, affordable BI solution for all heavy users of Excel. We evaluate all development decisions from the standpoint of a non-IT end user and that makes decision making quite frequent quite difficult. We cannot get enough feedback from our users.

Another challenge is that some BI people consider Excel THE enemy. We should regularly explain that in BI Excel (and Djeeni) has its role and you need not get rid of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Seeing that a process that cost 2-4 hours to perform manually just executes within 1 minute in Djeeni saving time and frustration for the user makes us every time happy and proud.

What we learned

Technologies: cloud and node.js Users: We started by helping at special tasks for certain people in finance. Later we recognised that Excel is used by a lot of different people in a lot of different situations and Djeeni can help them, too. Our product vision is now much bigger than it was.