From Where I Sit: Setting Up Shop

By Larry Eiss

I don’t recall exactly when the woodworking bug hit me, but I know it was sometime before we moved to Red Fox Run. We were living on Long Island and various home improvement projects had been nudging me in the direction of finer work for some time. Our house there had a cozy little room that housed the water heater and furnace. In that room I found space to construct a workbench. I mark this as the birth of my shop.

For more than two years before moving to the country I read everything I could find about woodworking. I lurked in USENET newsgroups, browsed Web sites, read magazine articles, and thought constantly about building furniture. A Web forum called The Oak became my most frequented and trusted source. Although I didn’t have the space to follow through on what I was learning, it was there that I got the advice about tools that guided my decisions about purchases I made when I finally got a large enough shop.

I dreamt of the day when I would finally be able to begin cutting wood and building beautiful furniture to fill my house and impress my friends. Like most dreams, however, this one didn’t become a reality exactly according to plan.

I knew from my reading that a good table saw was the centerpiece of any woodworking shop and I had decided on a Cabinet saw called the Unisaw by Delta Machinery. This saw is a high-end tool that will be going strong long after I have departed this world. Tools like this are very expensive. Although I knew it was central, I made a financially motivated decision to purchase other tools first.

The first thing I bought was a router table. This is arguably the second most useful tool in the shop. By buying lumber that was already dimensioned and surfaced on all four sides and cutting it with my handheld circular saw or a hand saw, I could build simple projects using the router to shape wood. I completed several interesting projects while this was my only large tool, but my capabilities were severely limited.

A friend gave me a very low-end table saw, which I welcomed since I knew that a table saw was crucial. This tool looked like a table saw, claimed to be a table saw, and even had a few limited uses, but it wouldn’t cut accurately enough for sophisticated work. This disappointing lack of performance was something I should have expected because under the nice looking top it was essentially a cheap circular saw bolted to a flat surface.

After the router came the thickness planer, then the band saw followed by the jointer and a drill press. Each tool made it easier and more practical to embark on increasingly sophisticated projects, but I felt the lack of the quality table saw on every project.

I finally added the Unisaw and placed it at its rightful location in the center of my shop. The difference this tool makes is nearly impossible to describe. For one thing, I now feel like I am equipped to do any project I decide to take on. More than that, though, this tool enables me to make highly accurate cuts and to mill lumber in ways impossible before. It speeds simple operations as well.

Setting up a woodworking shop has taught me a bit about the benefits of using the correct tools. And from where I sit, the implications for Business Intelligence solutions are obvious. As with power tools for woodworkers, there are many BI tools on the market. Also like power tools, not all BI tools are created equal. Trying to cut costs by buying the low end makes the solution less efficient and the benefits gained less sophisticated and less valuable. Adding components one by one delays and minimizes the return on investment and often results in a hodge-podge of tools that do not yield the benefits they were purchased to deliver.

Like the tools in my shop, the current set of tools in the WebFOCUS product suite is capable, functional and effective. In the hands of a skilled professional, they are often used to create incredibly valuable applications without which large organizations would be significantly less competitive.

In recent years the power tool manufacturers have been working hard to make sophisticated tools available to more people and reduce the need for training and long apprenticeships. Compound miter saws with lasers that show where the blade will enter the wood are a prime example. Once again, there are parallels in business intelligence. During the next 18 months, we on the WebFOCUS team will be overhauling our user interfaces and redesigning the way many of our tools work. The overarching goal of this effort is to put the power of WebFOCUS into the hands of more users. Coming releases will sport new graphical tools with visual development components that let you see what you are creating as you work. Boardroom-quality graph output, more flexible PDF reporting, and the ability to create freeform reports are all project goals.

WebFOCUS is an end-to-end Enterprise Business Intelligence solution. Like a fully outfitted workshop, it makes the job of solving complex problems and building sophisticated and valuable projects practical and efficient. Tools that look good on the surface are not always capable under the covers. Organizations that want to compete effectively need accuracy, efficiency, and the flexibility to create all sorts of sophisticated applications. It pays to buy the right tool the first time.