Anyone Can Automate

A practical guide for smallish businesses looking to automate their office processes.

“Open those two files. Copy this tab into the other file, and fill down those formulas. Now scroll through until you find a line highlighted yellow. Copy the ID number and paste into the system. Do that for all the highlighted rows. Filter and copy the list into an email to the team for feedback. If you don’t hear from them in a day, you may have to call them…”

If this story sounds familiar, then you’re not alone. Businesses everywhere are saddled with grueling manual processes. They don’t add value to your business, but they have to be done, and they keep you and your employees from doing more valuable work. In a world where good labor is hard to come by, the cost of capital is going up, budgets are tight, and customers expect a higher touch experience than ever before, this is a recipe for disaster.

Big businesses have the resources to solve these problems — millions of dollars to buy modern systems and hire skilled developers. But what are the little guys supposed to do?

Until recently — nothing! Unless you happened to know code, or have someone on your team who did, you were stuck.

But that’s changing. A number of new software platforms have been released recently that are known as “no-code” tools. As the name implies, you don’t need to know any code to use them.

There are a wide variety out there covering many different use cases, from process automation to data and analytics to website building and more. But they’re all similar in that they have user-friendly designs, often with drag-and-drop interfaces that make automating your manual work easy, and they can make quite an impact on your business.

For example, one company in the service sector faced two time consuming options each month: split a huge PDF containing their monthly roster plans and rename each of the 250 files, or manually export a single plan for each employee? Either way, it was hours of tedious manual work, and their antiquated systems didn’t offer any automated solutions.

The team discovered Power Automate, an application from Microsoft that enables users to automate repetitive tasks like their PDF work without the need to know any code. They used it to automate their file prep process, reducing time spent on the task by 30%. The ROI was huge, and employee satisfaction improved.

In another company, a product allocation team at a consumer goods company was spending nearly all week manually reviewing orders and inventory and adjusting allocations where inventory was low. They worked 10 hours a day, didn’t take lunch, and couldn’t take Mondays off.

Then they discovered Alteryx, an application that enables users to build and run their own data processes without knowing any code. They used it to build a set of data flows to do the tedious, repetitive parts of their job for them. They saved over 40 hours per week, and they can take lunch breaks and Mondays off.

Automation isn’t just for big business anymore. Now everyone can — and should — automate. In this article, we’ll guide you through the adoption and implementation of low-code and no-code (LC/NC) software and show you how you can bring automation to your organization.

The Solutions

Broadly speaking, there are two typical types of use-cases to consider for first-time, small-scale LC/NC projects: operational ones, which involve automating communication flows and/or routine tasks; and analytical ones, automating data prep and analysis. Here’s an overview on what kind of solutions are out there, along with some ideas of how you could put them to use. We’ve described a few here, but there are many more quality solutions out there — find the ones that are right for you and your business:

Operational tools

Operational tools act as the “glue” between the disparate systems that you use every day. If you spend time manually moving information from one system to another, these tools can help. Sending emails or internal messages, updating CRM entries, and managing files and attachments are just a few examples of how they can be used. You will often hear this kind of automation referred to as “robotic process automation,” or RPA.

Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate are both good examples of RPA solutions. Zapier is a software-as-a-service solution, meaning it’s hosted online (in “the cloud”) and isn’t installed on your computer. It integrates well with other cloud-based solutions, but may have some complications when trying to integrate with on-premises tools (software installed on your own computer).

Power Automate does better with on-premises tools. You can even use it to “record” your point-and-clicks to automate your work. For instance, if your legacy software has no way to schedule a data export, you could use Power Automate to simulate all the clicks for you and put it on a schedule. It also integrates very well with other Microsoft solutions, of course. However, it can be somewhat complicated when compared to Zapier, which is very easy to use.

There are even tools that allow you to build your apps to help streamline these processes and take in inputs from users. Think about some of the apps you have on your phone (not the games, of course!) Tools like Bubble and Microsoft Power Apps make it easy for you to build these kinds of applications yourself.

Analytical tools

When it comes to crunching data, you’ll want to switch gears to using some analytical tools. Think about any situation where you find yourself shuffling data around in Excel or Google Sheets. Good-bye, v-lookups!

Alteryx, Savant and Parabola all offer drag-and-drop, no-code interfaces that allow you to write a workflow that carries out all the data transformation steps you would normally do in a spreadsheet at the push of a button, or even on a schedule. Alteryx has a very robust set of features, but comes with a heftier price tag. Savant and Parabola have a more limited set of features, but are friendlier to the budget and designed for ease of use.

While these tools are able to connect to a wide variety of data sources, sometimes you need a bit more help getting your data from its source into a more useful place. Portable is a great data ingestion tool with a point-and-click interface that allows you to pull data from the source system and land it somewhere else. They boast over a thousand connectors, and if they don’t offer the connector you’re looking for, just send them a note — chances are, they can put one together for you in short order.

Best Practices

LC/NC isn’t a silver bullet, though. Just buying them isn’t going to solve all your problems. You can get a ton of value out of them in pretty short order, but to do so you also need to organize yourself well and focus on specific pain points.

Here are some best practices, taken from a number of commonly used frameworks for product development and design:

• Start small and keep it simple: It can be tempting to try to solve all your problems at once — resist that urge! Focus on one specific problem and solve that first — even if that means that you will have to do some rework when you move on to solve another related problem.
• Understand your processes: Whatever you are trying to automate, it does not exist in a void. Take some time to understand the inputs, the outputs, and the people involved along the way.
• Iterate quickly: Don’t shoot for perfection. Make something quickly and test it. Gather feedback, make adjustments, and repeat until you have something that really works.
• Document your work: Once you have things working, take the time to write up the purpose behind each element of your application. This will make it easy for you to hand it off to others so that they can monitor it and fix it if any bugs pop up.

Conclusion

It’s never been easier to automate your office processes, and the companies that make these LC/NC tools making them even easier by incorporating generative AI into them. They’re inexpensive, too, making them great options for small and mid-sized businesses. You don’t even need an IT department like the big guys to put them to good use.

If you follow our guidelines by understanding your processes, starting with small projects, and iteratively refining them, you can start achieving results in just a few months. In a market where labor is tight and the big guys keep getting bigger, achieving operational efficiency is critical to survive and thrive.

Automation needs to be part of every organization’s toolkit. LC/NC can help get you there.