An Excel dashboard of quality and productivity numbers for Amazon's Inbound Problem Solve department. Teams using it were 20% more productive than non-users at first, and 40% after an overhaul.
Amazon Fulfillment, Shakopee, MN The Inbound Problem Solve (IBPS) Dashboard is an Excel workbook written in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language built into Excel). It gives an overview of quality and productivity KPIs (key process indicators) across the department's roles, so feedback can reach associates in real time.
The dashboard pulls its data from Amazon's internal web tools over HTTP. Earlier versions did this with QueryTables, Excel's built-in feature for loading web data into a sheet, and a run took 10 minutes. A refactor replaced QueryTables with direct web requests (GET and POST) sent through WinHTTP, the Windows HTTP library, and brought a run down to 2 minutes. The same refactor added sign-in through Midway, Amazon's internal single sign-on, to comply with Amazon's data security policies.
The dashboard was also overhauled from the bottom up using object-oriented programming (OOP), which organizes code into self-contained objects, and clean-code practices. Runs became much more reliable, and maintenance and changes that used to take days or weeks now take 10 minutes.
Its coverage grew from 1 role, worked by 4 to 6 people each shift, to 8 roles worked by 20 to 35 people each shift. At first, teams using the dashboard were 20% more productive than those without it; after the overhaul, the gap grew to 40%.