Pratt & Whitney Canada · Engineering co-op
Automating a Recurring Data Bottleneck
A case study of one process-improvement project supporting aerospace production.
The problem
Useful data was arriving in a format that still needed a lot of work.
Data from an engineering system arrived in a format that was not immediately useful for the analysis the team needed. Before anyone could work with it, the data had to pass through several manual formatting and filtering steps.
The problem was not the analysis itself. It was the repeated preparation work that needed to happen before the analysis could begin.
What I built
A reusable Excel/VBA tool that turns the repetitive steps into a button click.
I built a Visual Basic for Applications program that automatically performs the formatting and filtering steps the team commonly used. The user supplies the source data, chooses how the output should be structured, and runs the tool.
The result is a reusable workflow rather than a one-off analysis. The tool was adopted across the team.
The result
20 minutes became roughly one minute.
That change reduced repetitive manual work, improved consistency and made the information available for analysis much faster.
What I learned
Good automation removes friction without removing judgment.
The decision still belongs to the person using the data. The useful part of the automation was taking repetitive transformation work out of the way so the team could spend more time interpreting information, investigating issues and making decisions.