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It's often hard to let go of old habits. Can you imagine processing your daily data on a tool other than Microsoft Excel? The task may seem insurmountable, but the productivity gain is far from being negligible...
“Let's go, let's jump in the water.”
It is indeed the sentence pronounced by The CCI Nouvelle-Aquitaine when we asked them not to update their map using an Excel file, but to completely change their work habits.
Here is the Excel file in question:
A few thousand rows, spread over dozens and dozens of columns. It was updated throughout the year, by hand, by the teams of the CCI Nouvelle-Aquitaine. This could lead to a number of problems:
- Several people working on the same file, rigorous version management was essential in order not to crush the work of an employee.
- One Lengthened working time because of the large size of the file.
- Of Wrong entries due to potential input errors.
- An impossibility to organize a team in teleworking, the file being accessible only from the organization's premises.
Once this observation was established, we made progress in 5 steps simple.
Let's start with standardization.
As mentioned above, one of the drawbacks of the Excel file is closely linked to manual data entry. Unintentional errors may occur and distort subsequent operations carried out on this data. In this case, this was data relating to the internationalization of companies in Aquitaine. Let's say one of them has invested in the United States. How will the various operators, over time, have written the name of this country: “United States”, “United States”, “USA”, “US”?
So that's why we've set up a automated standardization which made it possible to process the entire Excel file and to standardize its content.
Next, let's select which fields to keep.
The Excel file contained a large number of indicators. The question then arises whether to keep all of these indicators or to abandon some that are not (and will no longer be) used, in order to reduce the quantity of data to be entered by operators once the tool is finished.
So it is above all A consultation stage between the technical teams and the operational teams, to judge the fate of each of the indicators. Once the list is established, it is time to call on the UI designers.
Custom-made solutions are safer.
Each Excel file is unique, and so will each input interface. To do this, we had two conductors: the customer team who will use the tool on a daily basis and who therefore has work habits that must be respected; and the Excel file itself, which responds to a certain structural logic. We therefore imagined a tool that met both the needs of the client and the structure given by the source file, so that the whole thing fits together logically.
“Beautiful” is not necessarily the watchword: a tool of this type must serve a function and therefore respond to precise ergonomics. Simplicity and practicality led us to design and develop the above interface.
Isn't this tool a bit empty?
Indeed! The tool and the fields are created, everything is ready, all that's missing is... the data! How then to integrate them, without the CCI Nouvelle-Aquitaine teams re-entering them entirely by hand? To make the switch to the new tool completely painless for them, we have set up an automatic import of old data from Excel to the new online database.
This is again where the standardization carried out at the beginning of the project is important: the import must be standardized and scrupulously respect the new input fields.
Are we there yet? Almost!
The tool is now working, the data is integrated, and secure user accounts have been created. Last step, which may be optional depending on the organization: link this new online database with the various visualization tools. In the case of the CCI Nouvelle-Aquitaine, there are two of them:
In order to easily and in real time feed these two maps, we create APIs who will query the database and show the right data at the right time.
Finally, the entire data infrastructure is now connected and the organization no longer needs to use Excel files on a daily basis.
In the end, what are the benefits?
- The main advantage is of course The saving of time. The interface allows you to simply query any entry, no need to waste long minutes looking for the right row or column.
- A transparent and permanent connection between the database and the tools it feeds: each data modified on the tool is implemented in real time on the various visualizations. Your service providers or technical teams therefore no longer need to devote several hours or days to updating the various tools fed by your Excel file.
- The safety is also a major challenge of this type of tool. Passwords, user profiles, connection logs, hosting on a secure virtual machine, regular backup: the reinforcements are numerous compared to an Excel file hosted on a local server.
- We sometimes forget it, but this operation offers the possibility of transform organization data into real added value. Indeed, as the tool works through APIs, it is entirely possible after anonymization to market data from platforms of this type.
