These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Monday, April 11, 2016

10-Day Weather Forecast

Holland, a regional freight carrier with terminals throughout the Midwest, offers less-than-truckload (LTL) delivery in twelve states. In the freight industry, on-time delivery is key to ensuring successful operations and repeat business; however, in extremely cold weather conditions, trucks can experience serious performance issues if fuel gels up and plugs a truck’s fuel filters – this can lead to breakdowns and more importantly, failed on-time delivery of customers’ freight. The solution to this problem is to add fuel additives to a terminal’s large fuel tanks before cold weather hits; this way, the fuel additives and fuel can properly mix before being dispensed into a truck’s individual fuel tanks. This weather report helps terminal managers know when they need to add fuel additives to their terminal’s fuel tanks by more easily anticipating extremely cold weather conditions. It also helps managers know if they have enough fuel additives on hand to handle the forecasted low temperatures for each location.

My report provides an automated solution for those at Holland to easily create a 10-day weather forecast for each of the company’s locations. It’s important for a terminal manager to know not only his or her terminal’s weather conditions, but also the weather conditions of each truck’s destination. This way, trucks can prepare for extremely cold weather conditions throughout the company’s operational footprint. The report is currently formatted to provide weather data for each of the company’s 53 locations on one worksheet. Users of the report can sort weather data by area, city, state, weather, chance of precipitation, high, and low. The source of the weather data is MSN Weather.

In addition to the report found on the worksheet labeled “Weather Report,” there is a worksheet labeled “Personal Weather” that allows users to collect weather data for any U.S. city/state by simply entering information into cells A2 and B2 (highlighted). Although the purpose of this project was to solve Holland’s weather forecasting needs (found on the Weather Report worksheet), anyone who needs to forecast the weather for specific locations can either change the city/state combinations on the Weather Report worksheet or use the Personal Weather worksheet to get weather data for new locations.

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