[DavidPeiffer]

Little different swing on things, but I'm an industrial engineer focused on improving factory performance. And a lot of that is simply building and refreshing reports. Often Excel, sometimes Access SQL, and occasionally R scripts. It's not particularly glamorous, but it truly does drive business decisions which neat to see.

Every time I start a new role, I write up detailed standard work for the processes and make notes of what can be improved. As time allows, I make those improvements. I also keep rough track of how long each update takes, so if I have 20 minutes before a meeting I can start and finish a task. This helps me on performance reviews because I can objectively say "I removed 1 FTE worth of report updating, creating ongoing cost savings".

The productivity gains are amazing. Over time, reports become fully automated. Logging improves, helping trace down errors. What used to be 8 hours per week of report updating becomes 20 minutes of validating data.

It's 10x easier to take a week off if your tasks are documented. I routinely write up a process then make another team member do it, so I can find the weakesses and fix them. This helps the bus number, and makes it easy for someone to cover for me if needed.