gilliali

Morning HN!

I'm just another Biz Analyst that's getting tired of building CRUD in Excel. However, the more I look at web-based solutions, my inherent fear is that PoCs and new and complex features are going to need full on developers, rather than our analysts just putting something together for quick use.

So what's a good way we can replace Excel and deploy stuff quick and dirty? Excel is good for BI and ad-hoc analysis, not production grade stuff we don't have the time or expertise to develop in SAP / APO.

The team is proficient in SQL, VBA and not super against Python.

This one is more on the Operations Research side of things than raw Computer Science, but who are the main competitors in the Network Modelling / Engineering area for optimization of Supply Chain Networks? Llamasoft obviously always gets brought up as they gobbled ILOG as well.

What are benefits of these packages compared to each other? Is there anything to be gained by going custom application route, hiring seasoned OR practitioners to build in-house models w/ CPLEX (or Gurobi or Xpress) compared to just buying a software package?