Have you seen mundane and repetitive tasks at your office being automated? (It is very likely that you have!) Then you have already experienced RPA or Robotic Process Automation. There is no point in avoiding it. The technology is here now to make it happen and if you don't do it, someone else will, and this is the reason why you need to embrace it.
Photo by Photos Hobby on Unsplash
RPA is a type of business process automation. It's all about improving your productivity by freeing you up from doing repetitive work that benefits both you and your company. Whether you are a sales associate, manager or engineer there will be a part of your job that can be automated to help you focus your time and energy on what is important. This can even be related to your personal life.
Today, there are a number of technologies that have been introduced where you can easily write a piece of software to take over a systematic flow of operations called workflows. This includes processes in your daily life, like;
- Moving emails from certain email addresses to a separate folder
- Automatically making calculations
- Scraping websites to get information you need
- Moving files and folders
- Replying to emails
- Managing inventories
- Sending status updates to your stakeholders based on changes to your database
- Adding rows to your database based on emails / attachments
- and many, many more.
Here's a great video I found on YouTube by Simplilearn which clearly explains RPA.
If you would like to know here are some more YouTube videos that provide more information
So how can you get started with RPA?
There are a number of tools out there that can get you started, but let me tell you about my favorite, Microsoft Power Automate (You need an O365 account to use this). Power Automate allows you to connect to your Microsoft 365 apps and many other third party apps to create automated workflows that run seamlessly on all these platforms. You can create very detailed apps that handle strenuous work like compiling survey responses, build sales quotations and many more with a push of a button (Most of the time the button is also automated).
Here are a few of my recommended YouTube channels that have helped me get started with Power Automate.
- Kevin Stratvert - His Channel
- Shane Young - His Channel
If you do not have an O365 account, you can consider using ifttt.com, where you can create up to 3 customized applets and use unlimited pre-made applets with your free account. IFTTT stands for 'if this then that' which sums up exactly what the tool does. It can be set up with a trigger and a result. If the trigger action occurs then a number of resulting actions can be started.
To get you started with a very easy example, lets assume you also have your own blogger account and you want to automatically share your blogs to your twitter account. Here is an IFTTT applet that has been created just for this - https://ifttt.com/applets/DhxBkJrH.
Maybe blogging is not your suit and you have a survey on Survey Monkey. So you want to get an email whenever a response is submitted. There is an applet for that too! - https://ifttt.com/applets/DW9mjDK3.
You get the point. There are a number of pre-built apps that you can use and you can find them here.
There are many more tools out there that can use to automate your workflows. Whatever tool you decide to use, you will find yourself working a little smarter and more efficient than you used to. Let me know in the comments below if this article helps you get started with RPA and hope you are able to make your life more easier and efficient with a bit of automation.
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