Portfolio
These projects combine insightful business process analysis with custom development to make work easier and more efficient. Your custom solution will be just as unique!
Service Schedule Optimization
Businesses of all sorts do scheduling as routine part of business. If a business is to thrive and grow, these jobs should be scheduled efficiently — meaning as many jobs get completed as possible within the time and resources available to your company. This solution demonstrates the integration of free optimization software into a landscaping company’s existing spreadsheet to dramatically improve crew efficiency and increase fulfillment of customer service preferences. This project replaces a manual scheduling process with a model solved optimally with freely-available, state-of-the-art solvers. Details in the blog post…
Dashboards Track What Matters
Business analytics tools lead to strategic thinking and smarter business. If the growth of your business is important to you, one of the most important things you can do is to unleash the power of your data to show you what is happening, what is changing for better and worse, and what you can do about it. Businesses of every size use dashboards for this purpose. Dashboards are custom data visualizations that provide graphical insights by organizing the data you accumulate in the course of doing business. Take advantage of data analytics and custom dashboards to guide decisions. Read More…
Solve Complex Problems
“Under the hood” in many custom projects can be found sophisticated procedures for solving unique business needs. This example is a solver built in Microsoft Excel, which has replaced a time-consuming and inexact process for scheduling student applicants into summer camp. It takes into account both hard constraints such as camp composition and enrollment targets, as well as goals that trade off with one another, such as student activity preferences, school and gender balance, and leveling of participation across activities. The flexibility of the solver enables “what-if” analysis of different scenarios and solves in seconds a complex allocation problem that previously took several people many days.
Integrated Business Processes
Customizing and linking powerful Office applications results in streamlined operations that follow your preferred business processes. This project integrates a Microsoft Access database with business rules, email production, survey administration, and report generation. It is a custom event management system for an organization that coordinates invited guests for hundreds of meetings, dozens at a time, year-round. This shows the flexibility of an Access database to pull together data from separate systems to display meeting preparations, consolidate workflow, simplify administrative tasks, produce reports, and automate email contact.
Custom User Forms
Well-designed interfaces are crucial to making usable, lasting custom solutions. These forms illustrate how a clear user interface can help users make decisions while interacting with what might otherwise be an intimidating approximate matching algorithm. It is used for the custom import of survey questions and responses from SurveyMonkey surveys. In these long-running surveys, questions change over time, ranging from minor edits to total replacement of questions. The user needed an import procedure that could detect all such changes and present a range of options for all possible decisions. This project implements a sophisticated “approximate string matching” algorithm and in an intuitive user interface to give the user clear explanations and maximum flexibility.
Power Spreadsheets
Many users rely on spreadsheets for ease of data organization and calculation. This only scratches the surface of what can be accomplished with modern spreadsheets through the use of standard and custom functions, conditional formatting, linking to other data sources and more. This is a custom Excel spreadsheet for Event Invitation Management, tracking the availability and invitation of 1,000+ experts. At first the user had unmanaged lists of contacts with no way to effectively search it for qualified experts. The revised “power spreadsheet” puts that data to work, matching participant expertise to upcoming events, managing invitation lists for those events, and feeding mail-merge for easy email recruitment.
Data Analytics
The right data, properly organized and presented, creates a window on operations and performance, guides decision making, and leads to better outcomes. Here an Excel-based tool connects to back-end business databases to provide real-time analytics of performance and service quality tracking. This organization has relevant data in a back-end enterprise database. Excel pulls live business data from that database and calculates real-time assessment of business and customer service performance metrics. The dashboard allows users to specify several kinds of parameters, making this tool suitable in all departments and at all levels of the organization.
Get Organized with Databases
Access is a powerful desktop database management system perfect for putting your data together for easy, consistent operations. This can be done entirely within Access, connected to additional enterprise data sources, or in any combination. This Access database is a record-keeping system for administration of a summer camp. It imports the results from an Excel camp scheduling solver (see Solve Complex Problems, above). Once the selected campers are imported into this system, camp administrators can easily plan and conduct camp, including managing camp registration and assignments, maintaining crucial contact information, setting up new trips and activities, and more. The database automatically generates attendance forms and automates email contact to parents.
