Scheduler toolkit
Summary
- Situation
- Schedulers spent time every week on repetitive tasks such as payroll, stakeholder presentations and schedule amendments.
- What I did
- Built a set of small Excel tools, each automating one recurring task.
- Result
- Time spent on these tasks fell by 40–50% on average, and they're done the same way every time.
Before
- Do the task by hand every week
- Copy data between sheets
- Check the results manually
After
- Run the tool
- Check the output
- Role
- Sole developer
- Period
- Sep 2024 – Present
- Team
- Built for the scheduling team
- Stack
- Excel · VBA · Power Query · Formulas
- Sheet
- P-03 · rev. Sep 2026
- −40–50%Time on these tasks
The question
Beyond scheduling itself, schedulers handle recurring work: payroll, preparing presentations for stakeholders, and amending schedules. Each task is small, but together they take a real share of the week.
Which of them are worth automating, and how?
Data & constraints
- Inputs: the spreadsheets and exports each task already used.
- Tools: Excel only, so the tools run where schedulers already work.
- Users: schedulers with different levels of Excel experience.
- Confidentiality: no payroll data, names or figures are shown here.
Approach
Each tool follows the same pattern:
- Find a task that repeats every week and follows the same steps.
- Measure roughly how long it takes and where mistakes happen.
- Automate it: Power Query for the data, formulas for the logic, VBA for the steps in between.
- Hand it over with the steps visible, so anyone on the team can run it.
Result
Time spent on these tasks fell by 40–50% on average, and they’re done the same way every time.
Limitations & next steps
- The 40–50% is an average across the tools, not a precise figure for each one.
- Each tool is built around its current spreadsheet layout, so upstream changes need small fixes.
- Next: measure the saving for each tool separately and add the figures here.