Change the way you work and solve problems.
Spreadsheets are everywhere in business and are used to extract data from systems which can be tedious and slow especially if done daily or weekly to then be able to generate reports. Imagine automating the extracts, consolidating the data, and sending out a report with the summary.
Benefits
Pro Tip
Accept slight differences in the process as long as the outcome is the same, for example loading the data into Airtable or Google Sheets and then generating reports. A small adjustment in expectation or process can lead to major time savings.
When running any business there are always operational tasks to be done, consider it housekeeping or weekly chores. In the engineering and cloud world, these sorts of operational tasks can be automated through Runbook style executions. Doing this through a workflow tool is no different, you can execute manually as needed or set up a trigger based on an event.
Benefits
Pro Tip
Start with whatever you have, whether scripts or custom containers, wire it together and iterate improvements as a team. You can also put steps and information in the Workflows notes for the whole team.
It could be as simple as sending a welcome email, or integrating to a landscape of tools that you need to create accounts or spaces in.
Benefits
Pro Tip
Design out your process in the Canvas, including manual tasks and required approvals. This will allow you to determine which part of the process to tackle first.
Ensuring a particular way of working gets harder as you scale, yet sometimes compliance requires you to complete certain tasks in a certain way. It could be as simple as ensuring time sheets are filled in weekly and sending reminders or a more complex process of ensuring requests (such as account deletion) are actioned in a specific time period to ensure you meet regulatory compliance.
Benefits
Pro Tip
Even if the task seems little, it may have a business impact if not completed in a timely matter, setting up for automation now may reduce the risk later on.
As teams adopt cloud it usually comes with increased pace and greater access which increases the momentum of the business. However this can come at a cost with forgotten cloud resources driving up spend.
Benefits
Pro Tip
It's a common case of cloud bill shock due to forgetting about services being consumed that are no longer needed. Start with a simple workflow that watches your cloud account and posts a weekly summary and then automate further by taking action to remove resources that don't have a specific 'keep' label. This will ensure you don't find a cloud service one year later that would have saved you thousands of dollars.
Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, has been a common way for businesses to turn processes into automation. It typically involves the uses of virtual machines running processes as 'bots'. As technology has evolved there are now ways to implement certain types of automation more efficiently and cost effectively.
Comparison
This comparison depicts the same process implemented in Blue Prism and in Boomerang Flow. By adjusting the automated process slightly, it resulted in an overwhelming reduction in cost and a 64% reduction in time. This was a real comparison completed in 2019.
