Customer: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)
Role: Problem-Solver, Developer
Challenge: When developing a resource site for RBS, our team learned of a unique requirement where their users needed to provide a valid “Cost Center” when creating their initial user profile or when scheduling large online events, which our company’s operators could then validate against. The list of cost centers was lengthy – there were thousands of entries, spread across two different administrative regions. These entities could change regularly and needed to be updated quickly and with relative ease. A previous solution to manually copy the data from Excel and manually construct a usable dataset was time-consuming and error prone.
Project Summary: Using PHP, I constructed a means to easily upload a CSV file (the file format we were provided with on a near monthly basis) and a means to import the data from the CSV into PHP arrays that could easily be iterated over and validated against. When a new data set was provided, the previous CSV was auto-archived on the remote server, the new file would be used in its place, and the team would receive a summary of the activities.
Simplifying this process saved my team many hours every month, and led to far fewer mistakes for everyone involved. The process was integrated with the customer’s sign-up and event booking flow so that user’s were aware of this requirement up-front and not after they’d seemingly submitted a “successful” request, but then later learning it was missing important information. After all parties were comfortable with the updated process, it was handed off from our group so that development assistance was no longer required for this task.