My purpose in writing these stories is to get people to realize that they need to find ways to automate things in their lives.<\/p>\n
Throughout my career, which is just over 20 years, I am amazed at how many people continue to do things that could have been automated long before.<\/p>\n
For instance, I was running an office in South Carolin.\u00a0 For several months, \u00a0Paul one of my managers was doing this task every day which took him almost two hours.\u00a0 He was tasked with creating a report for a customer. He would gather data from a couple of different places on the system compile that data and then send it over to the customer.\u00a0\u00a0 He had been doing this for several months and wasn\u2019t complaining.<\/p>\n
I asked him one day to show me the process, in case he was sick or heaven forbid died.<\/p>\n
I sat with him for over two hours while he explained the process.\u00a0 After he had been finished showing me the process, I realized immediately the whole thing could be automated.\u00a0 The next day I created a macro using Microsoft Excel\u2019s crappy VBA ( Visual Basic for Applications).\u00a0 It took a couple of days to fine tune the process. The process went from two hours to 30 seconds.\u00a0 But now, the automation now created cool color graphs automatically too.\u00a0 \u00a0The customer was happy, and it freed up two hours of Pauls time every day.<\/p>\n
I was consulting for a company recently I had been tasked with creating a rest API to accept order electronically.\u00a0\u00a0 I discovered during that process several steps the could be automated, making the customer an extra $120,000 profit a year and more than doubling the capacity to take orders. \u00a0\u00a0However, that is a story for another day.<\/p>\n
While I was building and managing that process, I was asking people from the company what they did and what was their biggest headache.\u00a0 The support manager was dealing with a product recall.\u00a0 There was some electronic component of a product they were selling would catch on fire, it only happened once.\u00a0 However, 15,000 of these components were being recalled.\u00a0\u00a0 The difficulty for the manager occurred when he received the part and figure out if it was part of the batch that was faulty, which distributor bought and sold the product to the company that installed the product.\u00a0 The support manager had teamed up with one of his supervisors to help do the research.\u00a0 All of the information was on three spreadsheets in one Excel workbook. \u00a0They had a box of about 1200 returned parts that they needed to check. I asked how many they had checked.\u00a0 He said they had been work on it for a couple of weeks and they had checked about 200. I asked how much time they were spending they said a couple of hours a day. \u00a0\u00a0They were soldiering forward without really any thought of \u201chow can we make this process better.\u201d<\/p>\n
I told them I could help make the process faster.\u00a0 I spent a couple of hours that day creating a macro with some specifications from the tech support guys.\u00a0 I took it back to them the next day we made some modifications.\u00a0 We took a couple of the components out of the box and started to key in the serial numbers on the items.\u00a0 This is when I realized there was a barcode on the component.\u00a0 I found a test scanner in a development lab to test to see if the barcode was indeed the serial number.\u00a0 Sure enough it was.\u00a0 After a couple of test scans and a bit more tweaking that day I finished the macro and they started scanning the components.\u00a0\u00a0 I saw them a bit later that day.\u00a0 They had scanned the remaining 1000 in less than an hour.\u00a0 Figuring out the hours and their salaries I had just saved the company $70,000.<\/p>\n
There were about 90 employees in the company at that point.\u00a0 I am sure there are similar opportunities to save that kind of money in any company that size.<\/p>\n
There are tons of ways I have used other tools to automate away little distractions in my life. \u00a0I will leave those for another day. \u00a0 Possibly next week \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My purpose in writing these stories is to get people to realize that they need to find ways to automate things in their lives. Throughout my career, which is just over 20 years, I am amazed at how many people continue to do things that could have been automated long before. For instance, I was… <\/p>\n