As an alternate title, I might have gone with “don’t reinvent the wheel;” but I was once told to avoid cliches like the wind.
Recently, I was migrating an extremely massive contact list from one big cloud service provider to another. Unfortunately, the new service provider didn’t like the size of the file. So, I set about to break my comma-delimited CSV into smaller files (one for each letter of the alphabet). At “C” it occurred to me that I had wasted my time — someone had surely created a tool for syncing the two services. To find such a tool took less than two minutes in a Google search. Breaking up the file would have taken a couple hours.
I remember when I first started treading waters in coding. I was working on a tool and asked a friend (who was a software developer) for help. His response was one of surprise — “Surely someone has already created that tool. Why do you need to make a new one?!” He was right. Someone had, and I had wasted my time. He explained the beauty of coding is that most tools have already been created, allowing us to focus more on the finished product’s functionality.
Despite his lesson so many years ago, I fell into the same trap — spending time needlessly when a solution already existed.
Why outsource ID card printing?
We have worked really hard to streamline printing custom id cards and production. Our goal is to save you time and effort dealing with jammed printers and staff allocation. When you outsource your custom printed ID cards you can focus on what your business does best.
My recent run-in with the contact list made me realize that I shouldn’t promote InstantCard as simply an ID badge printing service. We create photo ID printing service tools that allow your business to run more efficiently — so you may better focus on your end product or services.
Furthermore, outsourcing employee ID badge production to a service provider such as InstantCard, doesn’t just benefit smaller companies who can’t afford to resource staff to print id cards. For large, multi-site corporations, we can ensure a level of standardization and photo ID printing efficiency which isn’t possible otherwise.
So what happened with the contact list?
It turns out that the printing tool I found worked even better than importing the contacts for id cards via a spreadsheet. See, I had also migrated email to the new service provider. As it turns out, the tool I found also linked the contacts with the emails corresponding to them in the new email service. In the end, it not only saved me time but made for a much more efficient transition to use the new email service. In short, it was well worth the cost.
