Case Studies
The best way to understand what I do is to read a few of these short Case Studies...
--- Case Study: Rodale Inc. ---
Company profile:
Rodale, Inc. is a leading U.S. publisher of health and sports related magazines and books. Known for the monthly publications Men's Health and Prevention, the family-owned operation also publishes the popular magazines: Runner's World, Bicycling, and Backpacker.
Technical situation:
The Excel
spreadsheet is a critical piece of software to most accounting
departments. For a large corporation like
Rodale, accountants use many spreadsheets, and their size (and complexity)
range from just a few rows to many thousand rows of information. Sometimes, this information needs to be
formatted for proper viewing, and other times the data needs to be verified and/or
corrected.
This Case Study
is addressing the need of one accountant’s task of visually going line by line
through a few thousand row Excel spreadsheet of inventory data to make
corrections where needed. This task was
completed every day and would generally take several hours each day to
accomplish. She thought there had to be
a better way.
Solution:
Tim Afflerbach sat down with the accountant, and through a
detailed step by step analysis of the procedure, a custom Excel macro was
formulated to exactly replicate her procedure.
Along with duplicating her exact procedure, an added benefit was included
to color code special conditions that existed in data that needed special
attention. Depending on the size of this
spreadsheet for any given day, the macro runs in approximately 30 seconds with
a click of a mouse.
Benefits:
The benefits are clear.
Rodale spent a few hundred dollars to take a job from consuming ‘a few
hours per day’ to 30 seconds, with zero errors.
This macro can be used as often as needed and with no additional cost.
...The accountant’s morale was also improved.
--- Case Study: Pennmark Auto Group Inc. ---
Company profile:
Pennmark Auto Group Inc. is an automobile retailer. The company is an automobile dealership for Mercedes Benz and has locations in Wilmington, Delaware; Fort Washington and West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Business situation:
With the popularity of Cars.com, Autobytel.com, Autotrader.com, etc., Pennmark’s auto dealerships were overrun with hundreds of dissimilar emails each day requesting information on new and used vehicles. Some of the emails were from past customers, and Pennmark’s sales force needed a way to handle these requests personally.
Technical situation:
The internet manager at Pennmark was spending his entire day viewing each email, determining at which dealership the car was located, if the customer was an existing customer, and entering the details of this potential new customer into a database. He was then forwarding the email to the appropriate dealership’s sales rep or manager.
Solution:
Tim Afflerbach was called in to analyze the current situation and make a recommendation. A custom Access database solution was recommended. Tim Afflerbach designed a software application that would interface directly with Microsoft Exchange Server, monitor the incoming mail for all 8 web sites, add all customer information parsed from a wide range of very dissimilar emails to a prospect/customer database, and forward all email to appropriate dealerships and sales reps.
Benefits:
And, this all happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without human intervention.
