Need ideas to optimize tasks at work

[Blake81]

One of my duties at work is to keep our website updated. This involves making sure that our products are synchronized with each vendor (ie. make sure we aren't selling anything they no longer sell, and make sure we have their latest products). I also need to make sure that product colors and sizes are correct and that the product image on the site is good. I was thinking that there are probably things I could do with VB to help me with this process. We have about 126 brands on the site, and when I first start a new one, it takes quite a while to first check if they have anything new to add, and then to check if we have anything old to remove. Adding products can be tedious too, but if I can streamline the first part of the process, that would help a great deal. I'm looking for any suggestions on how to do this. The one problem is that I can't guarantee that I'll have an electronic version of the brand's pricelist available. Thanks for any help.

 

[cjard]

Howabout you get your suppliers to do it, over the web, via admin login, then you can
a) print their pricelists for them
b) charge them for the privilege

 

[Blake81]

Well, I like that idea! I'm sure we bring in a good bit of money for most of them, so they should be willing to do that for us. I don't think I'll hold my breath though.

 

[JohnH]

About electronic product/pricelist or not, perhaps they have some electronic kind available at your request? If not you got scanners coming from $50 including OmniPage Light OCR software, if the input is not too distorted with graphical ornaments you can perhaps parse output text at reasonable accuracy, could be a real time-saver and lessen the tedious work.

 

[Blake81]

I have a scanner at work, which I use a good bit for other things. I tried scanning the pricelist from the catalog, but I noticed that some characters didn't get interpreted properly, so I didn't want to trust it, since getting the price correct is pretty important.

 

[JohnH]

Ya, I know, that usually is the case... but it may be easier to proof-read and correct some than to t y p e everything.

 

[cjard]

i reckon that a scanner would be more accurate than a human who has been bored stupid typing prices in all week..

Scan it twice, on 2 different scanners.. Gives a reference comparison

 

[JohnH]

i reckon that a scanner would be more accurate

Ever tried to OCR a Excel style printout with visible gridlines? Table data most often have gridlines in printouts.. it's a readability thing. My experience with OmniPage is that text usually is readable but the OCR software can place very strange and unpredictable symbols where there is lines (even slight paper folds), which could make parsing difficult. The same goes for letter/watermark graphics, when only vaguely visible as background they may garble up the OCR text completely.

 

[Blake81]

Yeah. The pricelist I'm working from now has the company logo as a background that pretty much covers the whole page. I haven't tried any OCR software yet to see if I can find a good one. Basically, I just hit the scan button on the scanner and told it to scan to Microsoft Word when it asked what I was scanning. I'm past the part of comparing catalog items to the website in this current catalog, so I'm about 300 pages of products away from having to deal with the situation again. The current manufacturer isn't really a well-known one, so it could explain why they don't have a PDF pricelist on their website. Many of the other ones I've worked with usually have them.

 

[cjard]

PDF still isnt that helpful. Get them to send you the file they sent to their printers, or ask them how they prepared it.. The only time when youre really screwed is if they have done it in a paint package, but even then there are tricks you can pull by editing the image first, to strip out the text-like portions..

 

[JohnH]

PDF still isnt that helpful.

That depends on what input the PDF was given, if it was drawn text graphics or scanned document it is not usable in this scenario since the PDF page will only be a graphics image, but if the PDF was created from formatted/plain text you can select and copy the plain text directly from the PDF document.