Executive Summary
Background
The BYU Women in Business Club has been around for several
years, but in the past school year, its membership has grown exponentially.
While the leadership is delighted to see this kind of growth, the president of
BYU’s Women in Business club, Katherine Poulter, expressed some concerns she
had concerning the current method of attendee check-ins at events. For each
event, the leadership had to print off a list of members and cross off names as
each person came up to the doorway. For the first event of the semester, the
inefficiency of this checking-in process caused the event to start 20 minutes
later than it was supposed to. Katherine approached me and asked if I would be
able to create some sort of program that could use the BYU-issued student ID
cards to log members into events. I created a program using Excel UserForms and
Macros along with the hardware of a keyboard wedge magstripe reader to improve
efficiency for the club and simplify the log-in process.
Overview
I built a system to meet the current need of the Women in
Business club of a new way to manage check-ins. The user just needs to click on
the check-in button, select which event he or she is checking people in to, and
swipe each student’s card as the student walks in to the event. The first of the
two sheets in the workbook is the “Members” sheet, which holds each student’s
first name, last name, and BYU ID number, as well as a record of which events
each student has attended. The second sheet is the “Events” sheet, which keeps
track of each event with an ID, title, date, start time, end time, and number
of attendees. I’ve added a tab to the ribbon titled “WIB Functions” (WIB stands
for Women in Business) and it has four buttons. The buttons include a “Check
in” button, “Create New Event” button, “View Members” button, and “View Event
Reports” button. The interface is fairly simple to use and is pretty user
friendly.
Conclusion
This solution should improve efficiency for the club.
Checking one person in takes approximately 3 seconds (due to the length of time
it takes to swipe a card—the system itself takes less than a second to process
each check-in). Since the club usually has about one hundred fifty people at
each event, checking all the attendees in should take less than ten minutes
using only one station. I recommend that the club purchases two keyboard wedge
magstripe readers and sets up two stations performing check-ins, cutting
check-in time down to less than five minutes. Additionally, the system I’ve
created provides helpful member attendance information for the leadership to
determine how successful each of their events are and where there is room for
improvement. Finally, this program is very flexible and I could add RSVP
information or other metrics if that’s what the club desires. So far, I have
been only asked to manage check-ins for events, so I’ve tried to limit my scope
to that.
My writeup is at the following link: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/court101/finalprojectwriteup.pdf
My project is at the following link: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/court101/finalproj.xlsm
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