At a large teleco company, the corporate plans division have daily updates on the pricing of devices delivered from their accounting and marketing team. The price lists were quite extensive, covering a multitude of devices, also varying between companies they serviced.
A business analyst was tasked with taking the lists from accounting and inputting it into a single chart for the the web team to update the site. This process took about 3 hours every morning, and this was after the BA had slowly garnered a fairly large toolkit of macros.
Shifting management teams understood this BA’s time could be better used elsewhere and tasked the BA with finding a solution. We were contacted to help automate the job beyond simple Excel macros.
We worked with the accounting team to standardize their pricing list and upload it to a standard pricing API the web team to connect with to automatically update pricing. We worked through gaining approval through their internal tech division, which oversees all service deployments.
We spun up a microservice on their Node.js cluster. Utilizing their existing architecture saved tremendously on time and cost. This service didn’t need to be highly available, which simplified the process since the Node instance didn’t need to be clustered. This was possible because they utilized a static site generator that only updated the site once a day, although this instance could support hundreds of deploys if need be.
The BA was was freed up entirely from this task. The few process changes were minimally disruptive, and overall increased efficiency of the pricing operation, including list creation by the marketing and accounting teams.