Not every process improvement task that you undertake needs to take weeks or months to accomplish. Sometimes you can genuinely produce terrific long term benefits in mere minutes.
I was recently approached by someone began the conversation by saying that he needed my help to “automate a report update with some programming”.
He had been manually updating a weekly Excel report by flipping through a report that’s regularly a few hundred pages in length. The key values that he needed were clearly labelled, but he needed to differentiate these totals for different categories, and those categories were also clear within the report.
The entire update process typically took at least an hour, as it involved updates for multiple departments and as it was to be done on Monday mornings, he found that he was always interrupted by someone or other who needed something else to be done quickly.
Since the report in use was quite straightforward, I was able to create a Monarch model for him very quickly. At that point, I asked if this was a good representation of the data that he required. He indicated that there were some records that, for his specific purpose, he didn’t want to have included. With Monarch’s advanced filtering abilities I created a data set that exactly represented the values that he required.
“Thanks! That’ll make it very easy for me to do the data entry into my Excel report”, he said, sounding quite pleased.
Of course, you know what my response was. Basically, “You’ll do no such thing.”
In just a few clicks I was able to create a calculated field that would generate unique key values that could be used as a connection between the Excel report and the data table.
I then set out to create a Monarch project which would export an Excel data table, always overwriting a specific Excel file found in a specific folder.
Another minute later and I had a simple batch file that he could run from his Windows desktop to automatically run Monarch and create that custom data extract for him.
Next, I restructured his Excel report ever so slightly, and added some lookup functions to bring in the new data from the Monarch export automatically.
The entire process change took less than an hour of my time to not only conceive, but develop – all without custom programming. Hey, a two line batch file doesn’t count!
The resulting process is bound to save him countless hours, stress and frustration, and possibly even data entry errors for many weeks to come.
Time Keeps on Tickin’
Time is our most precious, and often most expensive, resource. Every organization has some amount of manually updated information processes. Which routine process can you convert from drudgery into an opportunity to showcase just how you excel with Monarch?
