Excel Macros & Handling Time Consuming Tasks

How many hours would it take to manually data enter 33,000 rates into your TMS?  How many weeks would it take to enter 25,000 to 33,000 rates for each of 26 countries into your TMS?  How many minutes would it take to upload if they were formatted as an XML file instead of Excel?  These questions plagued a logistics service provider recently.

The solution was to develop an Excel Macro that organized the 33,000 rates by postal code and container count into an XML message that could be easily uploaded into the TMS in minutes.  We have all seen these spreadsheets with 26 tabs with rates by country, weight break or container count, by postal code or port code.  These spreadsheets are not formatted for uploading into a TMS, but can be uploaded if converted to an XML message which ensures the data is placed into the correct field in the TMS.

For this freight forwarder it was more cost effective to pay their consultant to spend a couple weeks developing an Excel Macro that reformats a spreadsheet into an XML message.  In less than one hour 33,000 rates for one country can be uploaded; the operations agent is now free to focus on customer happiness, keeping freight moving, and handling exceptions.