Eastman Kodak Automates Data Retrieval and Order Entry and Boosts Accuracy.
By Bruce Davis.
My name is Bruce Davis. I am a Customer Relationship Manager at Eastman Kodak supporting our Electronics and Warehouse Club channels. My organization is responsible for managing a wide variety of styles of customer orders. Some of the orders come in through electronic methods and require little manual intervention. However, our high value equipment business orders cannot be sent electronically because they require so many manual overrides. The Kodak sales teams have much of the basic order data captured in spreadsheets. Other override information is a constant value across all orders for a sales deal. The lead time between our receiving the spreadsheets and when orders must be entered is usually short. The challenge was to quickly and accurately transfer the data from spreadsheet to our sales order system and to add the constant data to the orders.
We receive Excel spreadsheets from our sales team with hundreds of rows representing sales orders. The orders have similar patterns of the same catalog number, quantities, expected delivery dates, etc. for many different ship to addresses. We use Macro Scheduler to copy and paste the data from Excel into our order management system. There are many other overrides and text messages that have to be done on each order. We built a control macro that loops through several modular macros with a counter set to stop after the last row is entered.
Prior to using Macro Scheduler, we attempted to enter these orders manually. This was very time consuming and error prone. Since our order managers are often interrupted by other phone calls and tasks, they would sometimes forget which row of data they were working on or which overrides were done on a given order.
We have entered thousands of orders using Macro Scheduler. The tool can enter orders faster than a person, particularly when we have two computers running the macros. This frees up our order managers’ time so they can attend meetings, take calls and work on other tasks. More importantly, the orders are entered much more accurately than when done by a person. In many cases, we could not have met our shipping deadlines if we didn’t have the tool entering orders.
Over time we have learned to use the tool more wisely. Common steps done across different roll outs are built into re-usable modules. We only need to create or modify a few macros for each roll out. The rest of the steps are performed by having the control program run the common macros.