Name Badge Artwork Automation
Background
Toronto Stamp Inc. is the supplier of name badges for many fast food restaurants and retail stores across Canada. Every day, numerous orders for name badges come in, and it was time consuming to manually create the artwork and organize them based on substrate type. This process can take an employee 3 hours to complete each day.
Approach
When I learned of this process, I knew something had to be done. I spent a couple days performing the manual work to fully understand what needed to be done. I then learned that the graphics software that the company used had built-in VBA support. I took it upon myself to develop an automated process to create name badge artwork. Despite having no previous VBA background, I was able to quickly pick up the language due to my strong programming fundamentals.
Solution
After a week of working on this project, I was able to build a plug-in for the graphics program to automate the process of name badge artwork creation. The user has two options for entering data: either through manually typing in the information (great for smaller orders) or by importing the information from an excel sheet (good for larger orders). The plug-in then automatically creates the artwork and places it on the proper substrate sheet.
Result
This automation plug-in reduced the daily processing time of name badges from 3 hours to 1 hour, freeing up valuable time for the employee to complete other tasks. This plug-in also significantly reduced reject rates of name badges by reducing human error. However, this process still requires human input. The user needs to either type in the information, or create the excel sheet, both are manual processes.
Future work
Given more time, I would integrate the name badge artwork process with the company's order processing software to automatically extract order information, eliminating the need for data entry by a human.