Automating processes can provide an excellent return on your investment. For example I have worked on automating processes which would take three hours of labour per day, five days a week.
So even if we assume a relatively low hourly rate of $20.
Cost Per day $60.
Cost Per working week: $300.
Working weeks per year approx: 36 x $300 = $10,800.
So what was automated?
The manual process required that a person collect datafeeds from various sources, some were email as attachments, some were downloaded from the internet, some were via Dropbox etc.
Then the datafeeds needed to be imported using a Custom Windows Application that would Import the data into a database.
This process was automated by developing a couple of Services, one which would automatically collect the various datafeeds from all the various sources. For example the service could be configured to search for emails with a certain subject and an attachment with an expected format and copy the attached file.
Each datafeed would then be put in a queue to be processed.
The second Service was responsible for processing the datafeed and importing it into the database.
This example is to just give you a taste of Process Automation and may get you thinking.
Where can some Automation benefit your business?