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There are really only two business resources, time and money. Automation saves both!
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Being a data focused company means we like things to be simple and accurate. We like our data to flow effortlessly from one system to another and without any loss of quality.
There are many ways to do this such as application integration which allows for the passing of data from one system to another often via an API. This removes any silly manual copying and pasting or worse, manually entering the information into another system (yes it really does happen still).
You only have to automate a process once and it will last for the lifetime of that process. Need to change it, no problem just edit it and save the time you would need to retrain all staff to perform it.
If you spend a few hours automating a process that takes you 10 mins to run every day, you will save over 5 days of an employees time over the year. If that process runs for 4 years you have saved an entire month of time allowing that employee to be working on more valuable tasks. This can increase productivity, increase service levels and customer satisfaction. The ROI of process automation really is incredible and that effect compounds over time.
Run a manual process once, shame on you. Run a manual process twice shame on your company.
A small return over a long time can become a great reward for your business. Every little gain compounds into a higher return. Little inefficiencies removed turn into leaner departments increasing team productivity. Throwing people at a problem is no longer effective especially after the cost of employment has significantly increased.
Taking the minimum wage increase on its own means you need every person to be delivering 6.7% more per hour than they were. Public sector workers are said to be producing 8.5% less than they were in 2019 even for that potential cost increase so next year will be quite interesting.
With each automated run of a process you gain a little time saving like a dividend, paying out a little bit regularly over a long period of time.
There are two types of automation, attended where a user is required to click run on a process on their machine and unattended where it runs on a schedule on a dedicated instance. Unattended are cheaper to run as there are additional costs to running them on a dedicated instance.
One additional point to mention is that the unattended automations can be shared amongst multiple people so when an employee is away the process can still be run without any knowledge of the underlying process at all.
The amount of different things that used to require a human to complete can now be completed by a bot. Interacting with web applications, performing tasks in excel, just about anything you can do a bot can be taught to do.
You can use a variety of logical tasks like loops to cycle through repetitions like opening every file in a folder in order to process them individually. The capability of power automate is also being extended all the time with new integrations and features making automation more powerful and useful to a wider range of tasks.
We like to take a logical view when it comes to deciding where to start but there are two initial starting points. Short simple processes with a high frequency of use are the first place to start. For example anything that takes 10 minutes to run but is run multiple times a day can save a lot of time over the year once automated. Next anything that is a long process that is run once or a few times a month like a report that takes a day or more to create each month can also benefit from automation.
Longer processes may be more complex to automate but the benefits can total quite quickly. In both cases multiply the number of minutes / hours it takes to run with the number of times that process is run.
Start with the highest value from the multiplication with the easiest process to automate. This will allow you to see how long it will take to automate a process and give you some experience for taking on the more complex automations. Then work your way through your list.
Make sure to track how many processes you have automated and the number of times they are used to work out how much time you are saving.
Started programming in VB 6 at the age of 15. Got into databases for AS and A levels and didn't know that database administration was a job so I went to study Software Engineering at UWE. I just thought database management would be considered 'IT'. I have been a full time DBA since 2010. Love everything data, software development and just tech in general.
