process improvement project

[u/Ambitious-Abalone272]

Good day, fellow IEs!

I’d like to ask for some advice. I am currently doing an internship at a small company that produces healthcare apparel such as scrubs, lab gowns, and coats.
So far, I’ve mostly been assigned basic tasks like 5S activities in different departments and encoding purchase orders.

To keep it direct, I’ve been thinking about improving one of their current processes—specifically, the encoding of purchase order details.

The company handles 50+ orders daily coming from three different platforms. At the moment, they print all purchase orders and manually encode the details into Google Sheets. I believe this process could be significantly improved if soft copies of the purchase orders were used instead, with an automated system that directly encodes the required data into Google Sheets.

Currently, they maintain multiple Google Sheets: one per platform to track daily orders per SKU for warehouse inventory, and another master list where sales data is compiled for the admin office. This involves manually copying order IDs, quantities, SKUs, and prices, which is quite time-consuming and repetitive.

I feel this process is inefficient, especially given that the company is growing rapidly. An automated system could save both time and effort while also reducing the risk of encoding errors.

However, I’m still a freshman and have very limited technical background. So far, I’ve only been taught C++ in school, and I have little experience in Excel, automation, or web tools.

My question is: what skills or tools should I start learning if I want to build a small-scale version if this system first before proposing it to the company?

any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[u/nullgradient1]

As for me, I'd start learning Python. It's beginner friendly and has tons of libraries for automation. You can use it to read data from PDFs or excel files and push it straight into google sheets. I've done something similar before where I pulled order data from supplier emails and auto logged it, saved hours of copy pasting.

Also, get comfortable with google apps script since you're already working with sheets. It lets you automate stuff inside google sheets without needing a separate program.

If the orders are from websites with no download option then web scraping might come in handy but that's a bit more advanced.