The IT deparmtent was regularly being asked to perform repetitive data entry/data maintenance tasks - via helpdesk tickets, emails, phone calls and walk-ins.
Here are a few examples, possibly some of them may sound familiar to you:
- Cancel production of item 3 on order number P12345.
- Stop sending jobs to the queue for machine A.
- Start sending jobs back again to the queue for machine A.
- Change the weekly KPI target for department A from 80% to 90%.
- Update prices for all items in category A first thing on Monday morning by 5%.
- Add another customer to the hard-coded list of customers that get grommets on the inside of their widgets instead of the outside.
Each of these tasks alone may only take a few minutes.
BUT the Total Cost of Ownership will forever be creeping upwards.
The opportunity cost here is huge, considering the expensive resource being used - developer time.
About the project
Repetitive tasks performed by software developers need to be identified and automated as a priority.
Each one of them plays a part in the “death by a thousand cuts” of in-house development/IT departments.
User interfaces needed to be provided for authenticated and authorised managers and administrators to change these values themselves.
Challenges
Each time one of these repetitive “data entry” tasks was identified, the process to create a screen accessible to the user needs to be easy to repeat.
This ensures that the developer that gets the phone call or helpdesk ticket will pick this option instead of doing the quickie manual SQL database update.
The manual updating method does have one positive aspect to it - updates to the data are only made by authorised people, i.e. the developers. Providing a web app to allow this to be done by users presents a risk of unauthorised updates.
Solution
✅ Using Microsoft’s .Net tools to efficiently scaffold a database connected web app, with the required screens to update the data.
✅ Hosting the app in Microsoft Azure’s App Service, allows access to be be granted to only authorised users/user groups.
Project Outcomes
🙂 Reduced helpdesk tickets/requests for software developers to update prices, statuses, effective dates etc.
🙂 Faster turnaround time for requests for small but esssential data modifications.
🙂 Reduced the risks of possibly massive database corruption each and every time a developer executes manual SQL commands against a database.
Technical Solution
See my blog post on how I did this.