custom Excel project: Case Study

Outcomes

Custom Excel Services NM Industrial

What We Built

Nate Martinez Industrial Services (NMIS), an industrial construction services company out of Denver, recently reviewed their workflows and found some deficiencies in the ways in which they were using Microsoft Excel to create their submittal forms.  Digital Workshop Center stepped in to create a custom Excel and Visual Basic Application (VBA) to help streamline their processes and help save them tremendous amounts of time.

After reviewing the current processes with NMIS, DWC determined that they did not have an effective system currently in place to create these documents.  There was a tremendous amount of wasted time from the manual design of each form. Different users created the forms in different ways, and there was a lack of consistency of the final product.

DWC staff interviewed key figures to learn the best practices for NMIS and what processes were needed.  After the interview phase, certain processes were identified that could be automated with some custom code.  A basic design was provided by NMIS, and we used that as a first draft.

One of the main challenges we had to design for the users was to track Specification Sections across the project.  Each Specification Section must be used at least once across the project, so we provided a custom VBA form for the users to track which Specifications have already been assigned and those that are yet to be assigned.  Some additional functionality was added to improve the user experience and make this part of the process as user-friendly as possible.