Analyzing Business Data with Excel

Chapter 8. Custom Queuing Presentation

The data in a queuing system can be used for many purposes. In the last chapter we used the data to manage employees. In this chapter we use the same kind of data to monitor the amount and status of work in the queue. Once again, this is mainly a presentation problem. There are not a lot of statistics or calculations. We simply use formatting and charts to tell managers how the work is progressing.

The application in this chapter uses metaphors and some VBA to create an easily understood interactive view of the work process.

The Application

The application in this chapter provides an example, not an easily reusable application. Much of the design depends on the data, and an application like this is easier to build from scratch than to customize. The design and concepts, however, are reusable and the application can serve as a starting point for custom development.

The application operates on data from a workflow with five queues. The work arrives as images. They could be incoming faxes or scanned paper documents. The first queue feeds a fully automated process that attempts to handle the work via optical character recognition (OCR).

The work starts in a queue named OCR, and if the OCR process is successful then the work is complete and leaves the system. If the OCR process it is unsuccessful, the document is routed to a manual queue named MAN. Any document that can only be partially processed and requires research is routed to the partially processed ...