fx ExcelSpecialist Nederlands
Case

Five days of manual work a month, down to a minute of processing

  • Client: anonymised

The situation

The same routine every month. Exporting data from the ERP package, pasting it into Excel, cleaning it up, merging it, checking it, formatting it. Five working days a month from one employee, every month again, for reports that always looked the same at the end.

Nobody thought that was strange. It was simply how things went, and had been for five years.

What we did

The export is now read in and processed automatically. The formatting, the calculations and the checks live in the application, not in the employee's head. The processing itself is one button.

More important than that button is what's underneath it: the processing steps are recorded and repeatable. If the export format changes, that's one adjustment in one place, instead of a month of strange results.

How it fits together

The same export at the start, the same report at the end. What used to sit in between is gathered into one application: cleaning up, merging, checking and formatting are fixed, repeatable steps.

Diagram of the reporting routine, before and after Two rows with the same start and the same end. The top row is the old situation: from the export follow five manual steps - paste, clean up, merge, check and format - and then the report. That took five working days a month. The bottom row is how it works now: from the same export it goes to one application, where those steps are fixed, and then to the same report. The processing takes about a minute; producing the export, checking the exceptions and approving the report are still done by a person. Before Export paste clean up merge check format Report Five working days a month Now Export The application the steps are fixed and repeatable Report Processing: about a minute
On a narrow screen the diagram scrolls sideways. The text above says the same thing.

The result

From five working days of manual work to about a minute of processing time.

That minute is the time the application takes. Someone still produces the export, checks the exceptions and approves the report. The pasting, cleaning up, merging and formatting have gone from the month.

The client's reaction was one we hear often: we should have known this sooner.

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