During the discussion of Data Wrangling with SQL, the subject of selecting data from multiple tables was introduced. This subject connects to the blog of last week, in regard to my job. Being able to import data from tables, i.e. multiple suppliers, would be extremely beneficial, since I can have data tables for each of my supplier. Using SQL, I can make monthly report and create tables by defect across all suppliers. I find that the FULL join could be an excellent way of combining tables, while also understanding the outliers between all. I will be looking forward to seeing how increasing my level of my skills over the semester.

Another subject that caught my attention was PROC RANK, mainly due to the college football reference. This can also be used when scoring and ranking suppliers based on their defect ratings, defect type, and frequency of defects. This would have been very useful in the past simply because it could have been used to make an internal score sheet rather than having to use the corporate score sheet supplied by our corporate team.

I understand that coding is a learned skill and it takes time to learn. I will say that with life going on, I have started to get slightly discouraged and wondering if this degree is sacrifice that I need/want to make. This week’s session somewhat lit a fire of interest in me again, so I hope that my interest continues to build.

The discussion of macros was one of the topics that caught my attention from this past week’s session. I like the idea of being able to have code in a task to repeat itself, without the extra repetitive work required. Macros have been a feature of excel that I have been needing to learn for years but have just not taken the time to fully understand them. In a few of my past roles, I have had to input repetitive data and/or information, into Excel, where the use of a macro would have been extremely beneficial. As useful as macro coding is, I have decided not to use it in this week’s assignment as I have still had trouble in understanding how to completely code it.

As I write this blog, I was reflecting on the previous class session and some of its information and how I can use it for work. Data merging is one that sticks out in my mind. As a quality engineer within the automotive supply chain, I deal with lots of supplier and their respective defects. The ability to have this data in a spreadsheet for each supplier and merge the data to be able to understand defect commonalities between each, could be highly useful and a huge time savings. I believe this will also allow my department to have better visibility of our suppliers.

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