Problem: A print shop provides plot services to customers who need plot schematics. The plotter devices are run by software that keeps track of the material being used and its costs. This data is captured into a Microsoft Access database which then is converted to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which is manually processed by a business user into a sales order. The resulting Excel file can contain hundreds of lines of data, especially if the plot job is large. The business user has to enter these lines into a sales order, but not before they combine and rollup similar lines into accumulative line items for the order. This process is tedious and error prone and can take hours to manually process one Excel file.

Solution: We developed a website application created for the company’s intranet that allowed a business user to upload the Excel file and import it into their back office as a sales order. The application consolidates similar lines into one line item, adjusts the pricing and quantities before importing. This reduces the errors introduced by manual entry and reduces the amount of time to create a sales order from hours to minutes. The application was created on Microsoft’s .Net platform (ASP.Net/C#) using Microsoft’s SQL Server database as the backend. Web services were used to import the data into the back office. .