I have had an experience that felt like it came right out of a ScanSnap add spot and so I thought I would share it.
We are about to go live with a new field management system at one of the businesses I work for, and I am in charge of doing the data migration, standard stuff, I take a CSV file convert it to a JSON payload and hit the API to have the system load the data and do validation for me.
After running the test datasets to make sure everything is working I call up the business unit responsible for getting me the production data and ask to see how long until it will be ready.
Well I am blown away, they say that they have been at it, getting the data ready for the last month but that it’s still at least a week away! Which is bad news because go-live is next Friday. So I suggest that maybe I should take a look at the process, see if I can’t automate some of it to speed things up.
The guy does not seem to think I would be able to do much because most of the data is stuck in these paper forms, I assure him that I have ways of dealing with paper.
So like any sensible MacPowerUser I head over and bring my trusty ScanSnap ix500 over, and proceeded to blow this guys mind as in a matter on minutes I turn a pile of papers, into a PDF, and then simply copy paste the rows out, and into his spreadsheet.
The end outcome was that I got my csv’s to do my data load, look like the office hero later for getting this back on track, and I don’t think that guy will ever want to do data entry from a paper form again without a Scanner like the ScanSnap to speed things up.
The best bit, it was casual Friday so I did it all in a MPU battery t-shirt .
