Web scraping aplicado al proceso de clasificación y reconocimiento de gastos de empleados en el caso de una empresa de la industria de la tecnología médica

Abstract

The purpose of this document is to present the activities and achievements obtained in a technical-accounting improvement project carried out at Zimmer Biomet, a company in the medical technology industry sector, as part of the development of the professional internship. The proposal consists of implementing web scraping tools for the automation of the processes of classification and recognition of expenses, in this case, for those reported by employees belonging to the cost center of the subsidiary of Zimmer Canada. This project was based on the design of codes such as VBA and Python for the extraction and processing of financial information. This work is a response to a need presented by the company to optimize its processes of classification and recognition of employee expenses, which were performed manually by extracting one by one the data of each employee. This represented a considerable amount of time for the person in charge of the activity. The objectives were to increase the accuracy of the information, strengthen data security and increase the frequency of data analysis. The activities carried out for the implementation of the project will be described in detail, including the key requirements of the project, the necessary fields for data extraction, the search and selection of the web scraping tools, the development of the process, and the application and testing of the process. Problems encountered during the work, such as the difficulty in accessing all the information on the target web page, are discussed and solutions to these constraints are presented.

Finally, the results show a marked increase in the efficiency of the expense recognition process, which greatly reduces the time and effort needed by employees to do so. Likewise, greater accuracy of the information recorded has been achieved, reducing the possibility of errors. This work can serve as a basis for future process automation projects in the company and other similar organizations.