I had a very similar experience! I used to work holidays for the family mail order business.
While we could easily process upto 400 small orders a day (because the warehouse was well organised) we maxed out at shipping around 6 large trade orders per day. Each one took an hour and the courier collection was at 3pm.
After getting through a particularly manic afternoon, I decided to have a look at why they took so long.
I realised it took 25mins just to turn the mailorder spreadsheet into an invoice to mail out with the parcel.
I was dying to automate it! I made a macro to remove the empty product lines, format the layout, background & colour, position the delivery address, insert the company logo and information and generate an invoice number and mark it as paid.
I even future-proofed it so that it would still work even if we added new products to our order form.
I stuck a big smiley face button on the tool bar. I tested it out, invoices now took around 4 seconds. The screen sat there with a beautifully formatted invoice, cursor flashing patiently for me to enter a payment reference and hit print.
Basically that one small change doubled the trade order capacity of the business, which was a LOT of income. It's an awesome feeling :D
That was about 8 years ago, I think they still use it now!
While we could easily process upto 400 small orders a day (because the warehouse was well organised) we maxed out at shipping around 6 large trade orders per day. Each one took an hour and the courier collection was at 3pm.
After getting through a particularly manic afternoon, I decided to have a look at why they took so long.
I realised it took 25mins just to turn the mailorder spreadsheet into an invoice to mail out with the parcel.
I was dying to automate it! I made a macro to remove the empty product lines, format the layout, background & colour, position the delivery address, insert the company logo and information and generate an invoice number and mark it as paid.
I even future-proofed it so that it would still work even if we added new products to our order form.
I stuck a big smiley face button on the tool bar. I tested it out, invoices now took around 4 seconds. The screen sat there with a beautifully formatted invoice, cursor flashing patiently for me to enter a payment reference and hit print.
Basically that one small change doubled the trade order capacity of the business, which was a LOT of income. It's an awesome feeling :D
That was about 8 years ago, I think they still use it now!