Prior to developing this automation, all of our
property maintenance letters had to be run by an individual in crystal reports
and exported to a pdf daily. They then had to run another report and
manually verify that each letter that should have been included in one of the 7
letter reports was included in that report. They then had to highlight
the missing letters for another staff member to manually fix. I
identified existing but unused functionality in an existing software system
(infoview) that allowed us to schedule reports to automatically run and email
nightly. This saved several minutes each day as staff no longer had to
wait for each report to run they could just download the pdf from their email
in the morning. I also developed a way to automate the highlighting of
the missing letters in the verification report, which saved a staff member a
couple hours of time each morning identifying the missing letters and
significantly reduced the number of errors that were made in identifying
missing letters. To further reduce staff
time spent fixing the errors and running the missing letters individually
another report was developed and sent out at the end of each day to all of our
property maintenance inspectors letting them know about inspections that were missing
the close log stop time which was one of the primary drivers of missing
letters. This automated report allowed
the records to be corrected same day and prior to the letter reports running further
reducing the number of errors and the time taken to identify and correct our
letters daily
