To give a more practical application of what I'm talking about...
As you know, I work for a major retailer. One of my jobs involves auditing price changes and doing research to find missed markdowns (which lead to shrink - which is bad).
Now, when I started this position years ago, there was a process. It involved printing reports, digging through them, blah, blah, blah. I work in a small store and it took me a day to do it the way that we were told to do it if you looked up the official procedures at the time. One day, spent doing all this. Painful. I couldn't imagine if I worked in a larger store and the reports that printed were 3-4 times the size of mine.
But if all you know how to do is power on the computer and search "How do I do this", you're going to be told to go through these reports, etc., etc.
Well, I thought that was stupid, so using my established knowledge base, combined with the instructions I was given, I compiled a spreadsheet that, when you plug these various reports in... it does all the work for you. What previously took me a day to do can now be done in a little under an hour. Bonus, I can run this report for any store in the company from my own little computer. Extra bonus - it doesn't miss stuff. Let me tell you, going through the lines and lines of data, you can skip over things. This doesn't. Extra super bonus - I was able to refine the process of one of the reports. The previous way used weekly sales figures. My method uses DAILY sales figures. If you manually had to comb through daily sales figures, you'd never get done. So now, my report is even more accurate than the previous method. Super extra super bonus - At the end of this process, you print two pages (possibly more, depending on how many mistakes you find). The previous process involved printing a report that weighed about 10 pounds. In my tiny store. Spread that across thousands of stores. Most larger than mine. Compared to printing two or three pages.
...and now, stores all over the country are using my spreadsheet to do this process. Because someone, instead of just looking up how to do the process and do it as told, took their existing knowledge base and adapted it to the situation.
*PS: Forgot to mention, this process? It's a weekly thing.
Topic: I ARE STUPID (Read 21476 times)
