Saturday, April 18, 2015

BYU Tanner Building Room Reservation Export Tool - Daniel Christ

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The “business” that my project focuses on is that of Me, Inc. but I plan to share this tool with my classmates and future BYU business students. The first year of my MBA at BYU is almost finished and one of the keys to being successful was working well with your various teams. This meant meeting frequently and this often occurred in one of the Tanner Building team study rooms. To use a study room, you must reserve it on the BYU Marriott School room scheduler web site (http://marriottschool.byu.edu/scheduler). To stay organized, I often would reserve a study room and then immediately create a Google Calendar event noting the room location, date, and length of time. As I looked back on this first year, I have booked nearly 300 room reservations and for each of those, I manually created a Google Calendar event. If I assume my teammates booked a similar amount, that’s another ~1,200 (~300 x 4) room reservations that were made over the past two semesters. We were all consistent in creating calendar events for each reservation.  If we assume each event took approximately 90 seconds to create, that’s 135,000 seconds (1,500 x 90) or 2,250 minutes or 37.5 hours of time spent on simply creating Google Calendar events. Unfortunately, I cannot have this time back but if I created a tool to automate parts of this process, my second year of the MBA program would free up a substantial amount of time for me and my classmates.
The tool that I built allows me to compile all of my upcoming room reservations into a tidy CSV file that I can then easily upload into my Google Calendar. The outcome is having all of my study room reservations turned into individual calendar events that are cleanly placed into my Google Calendar. My tool is driven by a single button on a customized ribbon that quickly allows me to log into the My Reservations web site, extracts all necessary room reservation data from the web site, and then places all of the data into a CSV file that is then ready to be uploaded into Google Calendar. The Web Query information is cleared after the macro runs so it’s ready for its next batch.

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