Lars_Sandberg Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 Hi, I thought it could be nice to hear you ME users, about which successes you had with Macro Express. For my own part I bought a license back in june 2003 and today I have more than 200 macros that help me very much in my everyday in front of my computer. It became a sport to me automating everything, that I could imagine, that was also quite som good training in programming ME. Last week I just ended a job which payed ME approx 130 times, in less than one week. A customer asked if anyone could help them in one way or another with exporting 13000 drawings from a windows-based 2D CAD system to AutoCAD's dwg format. The reseller who sold their 2D-CAD package, said that there was no possibility to automate that task, so the user had to do this export-job manually, which would take her around 12 full working weeks. I and the customer agreed about the job, that we would do for around 5300 USD and they uploaded these 13000 CAD drawings to our ftp-server. Within 15 minutes I have made the first version of my macro for the job, and started it. During the same evening my macro stopped many times because the CAD program had different dialogs for missing references, corrupt drawings etc, so I had to refine my macro for answering these dialogs also. The CAD software even crashed with Dr Watson, so my macro had to delete temp-files as well as dmp-files (with a bat-file) and then restart the CAD software, which was needed 990 times during the entire job. I programmed ME to log events into an ascii-file. It was very nice to see how easy ME handled that job, which would be devastating if done manually, just imagine if you had to wait 5-10 sec just for opening a drawing + other 5-10 sec for exporting the same drawing, then do it 13000 times (I would look for another job :-) Instead of 12 weeks the customer had their converted drawings within 6 days. I guess that many of you have similar experiences with ME ?? Regards Lars Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberchief Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 Well, I came into ME back in March of this year. And I do have to say that it has been the best thing to happen in my life since the Vikings won the superbowl. Well, Ok, so they haven't won yet... but hey, if ME can automate just about every project that comes by my desk, why can't it automate Culpepper to keep him from throwing interceptions?!?! Ok, enough with that. I work for a large phone company in the large business division. Everything we touch is LARGE. We are basically the front line to the customer. When our customers call in for changes... it is usually on thousands of accounts. Not just one or two. I have built about 60 Macros to automate common requests... billing address changes, payments, audits, service change, etc. Although I have only built 60 working... these are built to be as flexible as possible. Formatting and such changes with every customer, so I have built them to be simple enought to set 4 or 5 varaibles at the beginning, and the macro takes it from there. I have to say that my most recent success was building a macro to correct orders that were written incorrectly but a team of "proffessionals". There were about 6000 orders written effecting 2 state government customers. It would have taken a team of 6 individuals 2 months of full time work to correct these. With about 6 hours of build time, my macro corrected and completed these orders in about 14 hours. Was quite the hit with upper management. I am only doing this Macro stuff part time right now... we are working on creating a "promotion" for me to do this full time. Crunching the numbers... we expect that, working full time, this program will save our company $1.5 Million a year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lars_Sandberg Posted September 26, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 26, 2005 Wauuv, that just shows what a nice tool ME is :-) It is quite some relief to see such task's to be automated. Let's see if some other will contribute with successes :-) regards Lars Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberchief Posted September 27, 2005 Report Share Posted September 27, 2005 Bump... oops... Did I do that? Anybody else have successes they would like to share? I, for one, would like to hear what others are doing. Gives me ideas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe Posted September 27, 2005 Report Share Posted September 27, 2005 Where to begin ... wow! First, it is always a great feeling when clients tell us how much money they saved by spending some up-front to automate. If done properly, most automation tasks will save a company time in the form of man-hours. We have done so many automation tasks that they all become a fog. The latest is a system that automates a shipping process. When a sales order is generated, we have it write specific data to an external file that triggers Macro Express. Macro Express determines which, and how many, labels to print based on this data. It takes the data, manipulates it, and then fires UPS World Ship, filling in specific fields and printing labels. It also prints text labels for the boxes from BarTender software at the same time. After all labels are printed, a return table of shipping information is sent back to the Accpac accounting software where tracking numbers, shipping fees, and so forth are automatically added to the sales order. At the same time another macro, sensing that something has shipped, processes the shipment in the Accpac software, which generates an invoice and issues-out the inventory. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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