During one of our projects, we reached the stage of transitioning from an old system to a new one.
There was one operational challenge that quickly became repetitive: every day, we received an Excel file containing the details of trainees who had completed their training in the old system but had not yet received their certificates before it was shut down.
To issue those certificates through the new system, someone from the team had to take each trainee’s information from the spreadsheet and send it to the API one record at a time.
The process worked, but it required a significant amount of repetitive manual effort, and that was time the team could spend on more valuable work.
Automating the repetitive part
I decided to build a small internal tool using Django.
Instead of processing every trainee manually, a team member only needed to upload the Excel file. The tool would then take care of the rest:
- read the records from the spreadsheet,
- process each record through the required API,
- track the result of each request,
- and generate a report showing which certificates were successfully issued and which records encountered a problem.
It was a simple solution to a very specific problem, but it significantly reduced the manual effort required and helped the team complete the migration process faster.
What I value most about this small project is the thinking behind it. The goal was never to build a complex application. It was to notice where time was being lost, understand the workflow, and automate the part that did not need a person doing it repeatedly.
Sometimes, a useful solution does not need to be large. It just needs to solve the right problem.