Process Automation

Every small and midsize organization experiences growth pains relating to the number of manual, often multi-step processes they have to manage. These often start with the intention of being short-term fixes, but they can become institutionalized (and sometimes can proliferate).

Business process automation is the use of software to automate these repeatable workflows. This can often involve tasks including the following:

• Connecting multiple databases and applications
• Data cleansing on the fly, for instance to correct known data errors or repair Unicode character incompatibilities between systems
• Aggregation of values
• Automated triggering of new processes, either on a schedule or due to system activity

The objectives are to fully (or at least partially) automate processes, eliminate manual efforts so people can work on higher value tasks, and to improve process speed and quality.

Process automation examples

We've undertaken many automation projects, some complex and others delivering large amount of value for relatively little effort. Here are just two examples:

• Substantial automation of an internal audit reporting process, extracting data from a legacy Lotus Notes database, cleansing the data and using it to populate a fully automated Power BI dashboard. The original manual process took four days from start to finish, which we reduced to under three hours.
• Full automation of an organization's social marketing and blogging platform, scanning the content of newly-created blog posts and filtering specific versions of them to one or more social media platforms.

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a specific subset of process automation solutions. Typical process automation works with data stored inside repositories, accessed using extracts and application programming interfaces. With RPA, specialist software (a "robot") captures and interprets applications, usually desktop productivity software.

If you're familiar with macros in Microsoft Office products, then you can think of RPA robots as being macro steps that are designed and run from their own application, independently from the desktop application they're acting on. With RPA you can automate the sort of tasks where, for instance, a user has to copy data from a certain range of cells in a spreadsheet into a table in a word document, or captures negative data from a Tweet about your company and emails your PR department with a summary.

Workflow as a Service

We appreciate that not every company wants to invest large sums in process automation software (which can be very expensive). That's why we offer a Workflow as a Service option, where we build automation solutions for you and you pay per process run. It's an innovative, affordable option for even the smallest company. For further information, please get in touch.