Report Automation#
When I worked at the WSDOT Toll Division, we received a large amount of data that was summarized into monthly reports. In an ideal scenario, this data would have been validated and imported into a SQL database. However, due to skepticism from management and possibly budget constraints, this never happened. In some ways, that was a blessing as it offered me the opportunity to work more closely with this information and find ways to work faster, more efficiently, and more accurately.
Before I wrote automation scripts, the previous workflow involved downloading reports from the vendor, renaming files, and using a set of pre-built workbooks to summarize and aggregate data. While this process offered some time savings, it was very inefficient, had little to no error checking, and was difficult to update since it used both VBA code and institutional knowledge of systems, files, data, and processes.
The script I wrote streamlined the process by automating all steps - renaming, validating data, summarizing, and generating final reports. All actions are logged and can be used to track the speed and accuracy of the output files.