• Forthcoming Workshops: Using Microsoft Excel for Effective Capacity & Performance Management, London & Edinburgh
• Latest Training Course Calendar
• Capacitas and easyJet: A Success Story
• New Article: Understanding 'Percentage Waiting For I/O'
• New Announcements and Presentations at UKCMG 21st Annual Conference

Using Microsoft Excel for Effective Capacity & Performance Management

Tutor: Neil McMenemy, Principal Consultant.

Capacity and performance practitioners traditionally used SAS to undertake analysis and reporting. However, Microsoft Excel is widely available but its capabilities are surprisingly underused, especially its ability to analyse and report on capacity and performance data. This seminar gives practical advice on how to undertake a multitude of tasks using Excel. The workshop is platform independent, using various sources of data in demonstrations, and focuses on providing a value-for-money approach to capacity and performance analytical tools. Topics covered include:

• Pivot tables: manipulating data quickly and effectively; dealing with gaps in data; summarising; creating interval records from event records
• Filtering: custom filters
• Batch modelling: look-up tables; Gantt charts
• Surface plots: combining 24 hour profiles with monthly growth
• Forecasting functions: FORECAST; GROWTH; linear regression with trend-lines, SLOPE and INTERCEPT functions and the Data Analysis wizard
• Creating GIFs: saving charts separately from the workbook; creating HTML
• Automation: creating Visual Basic modules through keyboard macros
• Charts: dealing with ‘too much’ data; general tips

Feedback from attendees of previous events can be found by following this link. This workshop will cost £450+VAT. To register please contact us. More details...

London, UK, Training Centre:

Please click on the above links to review the course descriptions or contact us. More details...

Low-fares airline easyJet has, since 1998, delivered exceptional value to its customers by pioneering online booking of air travel. In addition to reducing operational costs the internet has grown rapidly to become the company’s primary sales channel, with over 98% of sales delivered via the easyJet.com portal. As easyJet grew it recognised the need to adopt a robust capacity management process and tool to ensure future revenues were realised. Read more...

Understanding 'Percentage Waiting For I/O'

Various operating systems have monitoring tools that report values for ‘Percentage Waiting for I/O’. Whilst this is not a new metric, there is often confusion surrounding the meaning and interpretation of this statistic. This article explains why ‘Percentage Waiting for I/O’ is not a useful metric when considering the performance of the disk I/O subsystem. More details...

Please see our Research section for a selection of white papers and presentations on various areas of performance assurance and capacity management.

UKCMG 21st Annual Conference, 26th-28th June 2006

UKCMG is celebrating its 21st Annual Conference in 2006 and as such has attracted a large number of overseas speakers and previous Chairmen. At the conference Capacitas will be announcing:

• New leading-edge seminars on topics affecting capacity & performance staff
• A new hands-on workshop to complement our existing course syllabus
• A new introductory masterclass
• A new course in our platform-layer syllabus
• ...and a surprise product!

All these will be announced at our vendor session (Monday 26th June, 13:25-13:55). Capacitas staff will be on hand to discuss our market-leading syllabus of training courses and programme of seminars. We will have a range of our course and seminar material available for you to review, please find us at stand 12 (see: UKCMG 2006 exhibition layout).

In addition Capacitas staff will be presenting on the following topics at this event:

• A Ten-Step Plan to Effective Capacity Management
  (Neil McMenemy & Andy Bolton)
• Cost-Effective Capacity Modelling: A Real-Life Case Study
  (Paul Seaton-Smith)

The presentation material will be available after the event on our website Research area. The UKCMG 21st Annual Conference is being held at the Chesford Grange hotel, near Warwick.

Recent customers of Capacitas include: Nationwide, Orange, Allianz Cornhill, Centrica, easyJet, Prudential, Royal Bank of Scotland, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever and Yahoo!. For more details on what some of our customers have to say about us please have a look at our Testimonials page.

If you are interested in learning more about our services please contact us.