Background
Many small factories keep their orders and records in spreadsheets, or receive spreadsheet orders from their customers. Once they adopted our system, they had to type everything in again, and as I put it then, “there’s no need to waste so much time for the sake of going digital.”
The first version was an Excel add-in. When I went to South China to roll it out, I found that most factories used WPS, where the Excel add-in couldn’t be installed. Back in Shanghai I rebuilt it as a WPS add-in that installs with one click from a web page.
How it’s used
Factories keep filling in the spreadsheets they already know. We set up a template, and one click imports the sheet into the system. Later it could also import bills of materials (BOM) and assembly work orders, along with the images in a spreadsheet.
Looking back
Every factory’s spreadsheets are different, so a template has to be set up before use, and that setup is still fairly complex.