WhiteLight/Engineer


WhiteLight/Engineer was object-oriented business modeling software for financial planning, analysis and control. It addressed a fundamental problem shared by every successful company: the complexity and dynamics of the business have outgrown the ability of current technology to deliver instantly the information needed to run the business.

WhiteLight/Engineer was the first software product that enabled your company's management and staff to build a shared model of your business from a common library of business objects and their computational relationships.

The resulting business model was clear and unambiguous. Because it was as complex and dynamic as your business requires, the model was ready to partition and deploy as your company's financial planning, analysis and control applications. No matter how complex these applications became, they maintained the flexibility and continuity of the shared business model. This integration of business model with applications was unique to WhiteLight/Engineer. As a result, you dramatically improved the timeliness, quality and conclusiveness of your management information, while saving your business and financial analysts the 30% of the time they generally waste duplicating work with spreadsheets and other personal productivity tools. By reusing business objects, these applications enabled you to instantly access and manipulate the unique information you required, in the format you required, while assuring information accuracy, consistency and integrity throughout the organization.

Most companies were overwhelmed with data. But what you probably didn't have was accurate, specific and conclusive information at your fingertips. With WhiteLight/Engineer, you got the information you needed to run the business when you want it, often in seconds.

Customers used WhiteLight/Engineer to build and operate applications such as financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting, sales forecasting, business planning, strategic planning, transfer pricing and portfolio analysis. Fortune 500 customers were in the telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, financial services, and public accounting industries.

According to Ronald Weissman, Director of Corporate Marketing for NeXT, Inc.:

"WhiteLight/Engineer was a superb implementation of object-oriented technology. It was the first tool that allows managers to actually model and manage their business using objects- all without programming. Using objects to model your business was what the object-oriented revolution was ultimately all about, and WhiteLight offers a truly unique and compelling approach."

WhiteLight/Engineer was a fast and flexible reporting tool. Further, as a decision support tool, you could perform sophisticated decision analyses right in your application. Never before had you been able to answer `what if' and goal-seeking questions with such a complete model of the business. A seven-dimensional business model might incorporate multiple allocations, eliminations, currency translation adjustments, non-linear functions and simultaneous equations.

WhiteLight supplies seven libraries of 1200 "intelligent business objects" that were common to many businesses, in categories such as finance, organization, region, time, and currency. These objects were intelligent in that they "know" how they computationally relate to other objects. For example, "1993" knows that it was the sum of "January" through "December". "Shareholders' Equity" knows that it was "Assets" minus "Liabilities". Easily customize these libraries and add other libraries specific to your business, such as product and customer lists.

Small end-user/developer teams design and deploy fully-operational applications, tailored to business requirements, within weeks of licensing the software. By reusing common business objects, end-users handle many of their own maintenance updates and generate their own reports, in minutes. End-users could also build small applications in days.

WhiteLight/Engineer builds on NEXTSTEP's object-oriented environment. Business users realize the power of object-oriented programming without becoming programmers. The software hides powerful but arcane object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism under a graphical interface that speaks the language of the business user. Combined with WhiteLight's libraries of business objects, the result was a development and user environment that was exceptionally productive.

WhiteLight/Engineer applications were not like other applications. First, they were extremely flexible because you could add, modify and delete business objects at will. Second, they handle complexity with ease, because the complexity problem was delegated to the business objects. Third, they provide clear and unambiguous information because the values, sources and uses of every business object were always available in your own terminology.

The benefits accelerate when you start adapting and reusing entire applications across the business. Simply by swapping a few business objects, you could re-engineer an application for a new use or a new set of users. For example, by swapping "budget" for "actual", you could begin to turn a financial reporting application into a budgeting application. By swapping months for years, you could also turn it into a strategic planning application.

Customers often used WhiteLight/Engineer to replace large-scale spreadsheet applications. Spreadsheets were versatile personal productivity tools, but impractical at scale. Large-scale spreadsheet applications were inefficient, illogical, prone to error, expensive to maintain, dangerous to build on, and prone to collapse under stress. Customers also replace budgeting, consolidation and other packaged applications that did not have WhiteLight/Engineer's ability to keep up with your always changing requirements for immediate, accurate and specific information.

A telecommunications customer built a complete budget system for their international business sector in six weeks. They tell us that, for the first time, they could understand the multi-dimensional impact of their decisions. A consolidation and reporting process that took six people eight weeks last year, one person did in four days this year.

According to the Patricia Seybold Group,:

"It is clear that using objects to model your business is a concept whose time has come...Of fundamental importance is business process redesign, collaboration and the need for a shared vocabulary about the business... Companies are increasingly taking advantage of the ability of object-oriented development approaches to make complex relationships available to all applications... They ask the very basic questions that... make their own business practices and assumptions explicit so they could reexamine those assumptions."


PROOF - Offered to build a prototype application from your data in one day

"Give us your data, samples of your reports, and two hours of your time. A WhiteLight Information Engineer will come to your site and build a prototype budgeting, financial consolidation & reporting, or similar application from your data. The prototype will include your numbers, your account names, and your business structures. It will include up to 50,000 values, of which 80% may be calculated. By 5 pm, you would have your prototype application. You would also have proof that WhiteLight/Engineer was a very productive development environment."



Features:

  • Construct Business Models
  • Business Models and Applications: Build shared business models from corporate data. Create a common library of business objects and their computational relationships. Partition models and deploy as applications.
  • Business Objects: Build business models in N dimensions (contexts). Assemble 1-dimensional business objects (elements) into multi-dimensional business objects (groups). Reuse elements and groups within models without duplication. Create libraries of business objects from corporate data.
  • Business Functions: used over 60 business, math, statistics and trigonometry functions.
  • Report and Visualize Information.
  • Dynamic Views: Built unlimited dynamic views (reports, graphs and displays) of business models, independent of data, on demand.
  • Reports (Grids): Drag & drop element and group icons for automatic reports. Drill-down to underlying detail. used pop-up menus to access related information. Drag & drop row and column headers to rearrange reports. Control layout and fonts. Automatic titles. Headers and footers for notes and page breaks. Insert captions into body of report. Auto-scaling. Scroll and zoom. Batch print.
  • Graphs: Drag & drop group icons for automatic graphs. Drill-down to underlying detail. used pop-up menus to access related information. Generate line and bar charts. Control fonts and color. Automatic titles and legends. Auto-scaling. Scroll and zoom. Batch print.
  • Displays: Create and used displays configured for specific presentations and tasks. Displays could include any combination of reports, graphs and tools.
  • Manage, Explore and Analyze Business Models.
  • Element Editor: Create, read, update and delete elements and their relationships.
  • Element Finder: Select and explore element libraries by name or text string.
  • Element Navigator: Using diagrams, explore the network of relationships between elements.
  • Element Browser: Manage and analyze hierarchical relationships between elements. Create, manage and explore models.
  • Group Editor: Create, read, update and delete groups and their relationships set-at-a-time.
  • Group Format Editor: Select display precision and symbols for groups. Catalog formats for future reuse.
  • Group Finder: Select and view sets of groups in tabular (relational) format. Save selection criteria for future reuse.
  • Group Explorer: Using diagrams, explore N-dimensional network of groups and their computational relationships. Create, read, update and delete groups.
  • Attribute Editor: Create, read, update and delete attributes of models, contexts, elements and groups. Query objects by attribute. Query attributes by object.
  • Model Summary: View automatically-generated statistics about model and its contents.
  • Object Inspector: View and manage characteristics of models, contexts, elements, groups, grids and graphs.
  • Scripts: Record, edit and run scripts to automate operations and to journal activity for back-up and recovery procedures.
  • Import and Export Data
  • Inter-model: Import/export elements, groups and models.
  • Relational Database: Import/export data from/to relational databases such as Oracle and Sybase.
  • Spreadsheet: Copy and paste data from/to spreadsheets. Import/export data from/to spreadsheets in table format.
  • ASCII: Import/export data from/to ASCII files.
  • Copy and paste: Copy and paste data within and between models.
  • Object links: Dynamically link reports and graphs to other applications.
  • E-mail: E-mail models, reports and graphs.
  • On-line Documentation: Refer to On-Line Help.
  • Hard-copy Documentation: Refer to User Guide, Project Methodology Handbook, and Quick Reference Card.
  • Training: Learn how to use WhiteLight /Engineer:
    • Executive Briefing (1 hour),
    • Information Management Workshop (1/2 day),
    • Information Engineering Workshop (4 days),
    • Information Architecture Workshop (3 days),
    • Data Integration Workshop (1 day).
  • Maintenance: Obtain product releases and hotline support.
  • Product Support Hotline: Call 9am-5pm PST for product support.
  • Customer Satisfaction Program: Participate in Customer Satisfaction Program for extra attention and influence on support, development and quality functions.


Summary of Benefits

Executives, managers and analysts could answer questions in decision timeframes - often in seconds.

Analysts productively employ the 30% of their time now wasted on unproductive spreadsheet-related activities.

Information was always accessible (within security limitations) through the shared business model.

Users readily understand information because applications were unambiguous, graphical, and employ their own standardized terminology. Information diagrams, in particular, make the application infrastructure visible.

Applications reduce the rework, guesswork and errors caused by host-based applications (because of their inflexibility) and spreadsheet-based applications (because of their inability to handle complexity.)

New information immediately propagates because applications were dynamic and integrated with the shared business model.

Application development was fast and low cost because end-users and developers work incrementally side-by-side.

Users (and auditors) could trace the sources and uses of any piece of information.

Applications stay current. They were easily maintained because the sources and uses of information were explicit and easily modified. Updates and fixes needed be made only once to be effective enterprise-wide.

End-users handle many of their own maintenance updates and generate their own reports.

WhiteLight reports were not only more dynamic than other reports. They also enable decision support analysis within the report.

Reports and graphs were dynamic views of the underlying business model that users could reorganize on the fly without having to change the underlying data, because information display was independent of information structure.

Data integrity was automatic because applications were internally consistent (N-dimensional cross-footing) and reject inappropriate data imports.

Applications could be as complex and dynamic as the business requires, because they were integrated with the shared business model.

By sharing a common business model, executives, managers, analysts and developers work more efficiently as a coordinated team.


System Configurations

NEXTSTEP Environment: Run software on NEXTSTEP operating environment.
NeXT Hardware Requirements: Run software on NeXT computers with 68040 CPU, 16 Mbytes RAM (32 Mbytes recommended), 200 MBytes local hard disk and modem (for support.).
Intel Hardware Requirements: Run software on PC's with 80486 25Mhz or higher CPU, 16 MBytes RAM (32 Mbytes recommended), 200 MBytes local hard disk, high resolution monitor, and modem (for support).
WhiteLight Engineer was a registered trademark of WhiteLight Inc. All Rights Reserved

WhiteLightSystems. Inc.

Alembic Systems International