Rajaganapathy K, Author at Innovatix Technology Partners

Rajaganapathy K October 1, 2024 No Comments

Maximizing ROI: The Impact of Process Automation on Business

Businesses today are increasingly turning to automation as a key strategy for streamlining operations and enhancing profitability. By automating routine tasks, companies can minimize errors, increase operational efficiency, and better allocate their resources. One of the most powerful approaches to achieving these goals is through process automation. By utilizing advanced technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), businesses can not only automate repetitive tasks but also optimize complex workflows—resulting in significant improvements in productivity and Return on Investment (ROI). As automation technology advances, its scope has grown from handling basic tasks like data entry to supporting complex decision-making processes. This blog explores the transformative impact of process automation on business ROI and explains why embracing automation has become essential for organizations looking to stay competitive in today’s market. Understanding Process Automation ROI Process automation ROI is a measurable indicator of the financial gains businesses realize by automating manual and repetitive tasks. It reflects the cost savings, efficiency improvements, and enhanced productivity that directly contribute to an organization’s bottom line. A comprehensive study by Gartner highlights that organizations adopting automation technologies can reduce process costs by 30% to 50%. These savings not only boost ROI but also position businesses to reinvest resources into areas that promote growth and innovation. Automation is not merely a tool for enhancing efficiency—it is an investment that pays for itself through tangible financial returns. The key, however, lies in understanding how to implement these systems effectively to maximize the benefits. Calculating ROI from Automation To understand the true impact of automation on your business, calculating ROI involves a few critical steps: Once these elements are considered, businesses can evaluate the financial gains and ROI achieved from automating their processes. The Financial Benefits of Process Automation Automation’s impact on ROI is multifaceted. Let’s explore three primary financial benefits: 1. Cost Reduction One of the most significant financial advantages of automation is cost reduction. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can reduce their reliance on manual labor. Employees who once spent time on mundane tasks are freed to focus on higher-value work, such as strategic decision-making and customer service. Automation also allows companies to minimize errors, which can be expensive to correct. For example, in data-heavy processes such as finance or supply chain management, a single human error can result in costly setbacks. Automated systems ensure that tasks are executed with precision, reducing the risk of errors and their associated costs. Furthermore, the operational cost savings from automation can be reinvested into areas that drive innovation and competitive advantage. Whether it’s research and development, expanding product offerings, or entering new markets, automation allows businesses to allocate resources more effectively. 2. Increased Accuracy Human errors in business processes are inevitable, but they can have serious consequences. Financial discrepancies, data inaccuracies, and compliance failures are just a few examples of the costly errors that manual processes can incur. Automation eliminates many of these risks by ensuring consistent and accurate task execution. Whether it’s financial data entry, customer support, or supply chain management, automating routine processes leads to more reliable outcomes. Accurate data is essential for financial forecasting, budgeting, and decision-making. It enables businesses to make informed, data-driven choices that optimize performance and profitability. 3. Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity Efficiency is one of the cornerstones of profitability. The faster an organization can execute tasks without compromising on quality, the greater its ability to generate revenue. Automation significantly enhances efficiency by completing tasks in a fraction of the time it would take a human worker. For example, an automated customer support system can resolve inquiries or issues within seconds, allowing businesses to handle larger volumes of customer interactions without overwhelming their staff. This ability to scale operations without increasing costs directly impacts ROI by generating more output from the same or even fewer resources. The Role of Financial Process Automation While automation benefits all areas of business, its impact is particularly profound in financial operations. Financial process automation (FPA) involves automating tasks like invoicing, payroll, tax filings, and financial reporting. These processes are essential to a business’s cash flow and overall financial health, but they can be time-consuming and prone to error when handled manually. By automating these routine financial tasks, businesses can reduce the time spent on administrative work, decrease the likelihood of errors, and ensure compliance with regulations. The result is a more streamlined finance department that contributes to higher profitability and lower operational costs. Key Benefits of Financial Process Automation Implementing Financial Automation Solutions While the benefits of automation are clear, implementing the right solutions is critical to maximizing ROI. The wrong automation tools can lead to integration challenges, increased costs, and disrupted operations. Therefore, it is essential to choose financial automation solutions that align with your business’s specific needs. Steps to Implement Financial Automation The Impact of Automation on Finance Teams Automation doesn’t replace human talent; rather, it empowers finance professionals to focus on more strategic, high-value activities. When routine tasks such as data entry and report generation are automated, finance teams can devote their time to activities that directly impact the business’s growth, such as financial planning, analysis, and risk management. Advantages of Automation for Finance Departments Industry Insights: Real-World ROI from Automation Several industries have already reaped the rewards of process automation. According to McKinsey, companies that implement financial automation solutions can see efficiency improvements of 20-30% within the first year. These gains translate into a direct increase in ROI and position businesses for long-term success. For example, large enterprises in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and banking have successfully implemented automation to streamline their supply chains, enhance customer service, and optimize back-office operations. These improvements not only reduce costs but also improve customer satisfaction and revenue growth. Conclusion: Automation as a Catalyst for Business Growth Process automation is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity for businesses that aim to stay competitive in today’s market. By reducing costs, improving accuracy, and enhancing efficiency, automation technologies like RPA and AI deliver measurable improvements to

Rajaganapathy K July 22, 2021 No Comments

The Microsoft Power Platform Tool Set: A ‘Down-to-Earth’ Primer

This paper provides an overview and practical guide to the tools within Microsoft’s Power Platform family. Among other things, this set of tools is intended to provide automation capabilities to users. That is, the tools provide customers with low-code/no-code tools for automating business functions and processes, including reporting and dashboarding. The tools are all state of the art, and well regarded by technology rating companies such as Gartner, with some being clear leaders in their sector. Our expectation is the tools will all widen their lead in the next few years. No surprise, all tools in the platform work seamlessly together and work well with other products in the Microsoft family, including Office 365. They also work well with hundreds of other enterprise apps, with Microsoft already having built the connectors needed to pass information back and forth between these apps. The tools in the Power Platform are all reasonably priced, in most cases well below principal competitors, and are easy to set up and use quickly, especially for Microsoft-based companies. We are writing this paper for two reasons: The net result of a company adopting these tools will likely include: many robots automating multiple mundane processes and tasks; much greater accuracy in data flows throughout the company; much greater concentration of human work on value-added and customer-oriented tasks; and of course, a major positive boost to ROI normally within-year. For the past several years, the hype for both RPA and digital transformation has been at a fever pitch. What we are hoping to do here (and in all the other papers and posts on RPA on our website) is brush aside the hype and provide practical, down-to-earth information on each of the tools and how they can work together to solve practical business problems and how they can be used to automate straight-forward business processes within mid-sized companies. In other words, they work, they are relatively easy to use, and once in place, the robots are robust and secure and do indeed achieve the promised world of robotic process automation! As noted earlier, our focus in this paper and our professional services is targeted to mid-sized companies (or to a mid-sized organization within larger companies). Leaders in those companies know they must act soon and forcefully to automate their operations but may have trouble seeing clearly through all the din of all industry and marketing hype. Our clear recommendation to you is to engage the Microsoft Power Platform set of tools to get the job done. Contact us anytime so we can explain our point of view further. Microsoft Power Platform The chart below shows the tools grouped under the Microsoft Power platform. They include: As also show, three general capabilities are common across all 4 tools, namely: hundreds of already-built Data connectors, an easy-to-use AI-builder that can be invoked in the same way across the 4 products, and a common Dataverse for securely storing and managing data across the 4 apps. The Power Platform set of tools enables a customer to: Commonality and synergy are the key themes behind these four tools in the Microsoft Power Platform family. Users can take advantage of common data connectors to easily pass data and information between the different tools. They use common capabilities and functions, which greatly improve productivity and accuracy in implementing the tools in a company’s environment. We honestly believe a mid-range Microsoft-oriented company should look no further than this family to power up their use of robots and gain the advantages of automation, including in reporting and dashboarding. Power Platform Family of Tools In this section, we provide short summaries of each of the four tools. Our point of view in these summaries is to keep our eye on the Power Automation tool and describe how the other three tools and the three general capabilities listed above can play significant roles in augmenting the Power Automate tool. Power BI – Used to analyze data from different data sources: It is the premier self-service business analytics tool provided by Microsoft. Power BI has a few offerings starting from the Desktop version to the Power BI Service, hosted on the cloud. It can connect (via pre-built connectors) to a wide range of data and apps. The tool can be used to design interactive reports, dashboards, or stories, all supported by compelling visualizations. From a Power Automate point of view, we see Power BI as the reporting tool for tracking and spotlighting all the KPIs used to oversee the success of the various robots introduced via Power Automate. So, log data generated by the Power Automate robots gets directed to the Dataverse and then can be used by Power BI to show all the relevant tracking results. Power Apps – Used to build powerful mobile apps for internal use by an organization: It is an intuitive platform that provides users with drag and drop features to build a user interface for a mobile application. The user can add various controls to the user interface, including textboxes, choice fields, etc. It also allows users to add in media devices like the camera, videos, etc., and other related features necessary to build a modern mobile application. There is a feature to connect to various data sources using Power Apps, and after the development is completed, a user just needs to publish the app for it to be available within the organization. Here we see the connection to Power Automate as follows. Once multiple robots (often 10-20-30) have been built and running within the organization, Power App can be used to build a tracking and alerting app to provide the automation team with real-time feedback on how well things are running and if anything needs to be investigated. Power Virtual Agents – Used to develop flexible chatbots that can communicate with internal staff as well as external customers: This is a new addition to the Microsoft Power Platform. Power Virtual Agents is the bot-building service provided by Microsoft for business users. Using this, a user

Rajaganapathy K July 8, 2021 No Comments

Automation of An External Data Feed Extraction and Assembly Process

This is the second in a series of posts summarizing case studies on robotic process automation (RPA). These posts describe a growing number of Innovatix Technology Partners (formerly Macrosoft, Inc.) projects done recently to solve client problems as well as several to automate internal processes within our company. These are real-life case studies of RPA. The automation apps we have built and tested are now working as intended or are ready to move into production. In all cases, we are using Microsoft Power Automate to build and deploy the automation robots. We are doing this post series to show the varied nature of RPA apps, from ultra-simple to highly complex over a broad range of business processes. We hope readers will find parallels in their own business processes. Stated simply, our view is that, that companies should seek out all processes that can be automated and build RPA apps to do that work. Gartner defines this view as ‘hyper-automation, namely, “the idea that anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated.” We hope this series of RPA case study posts will stimulate readers’ further interest in moving their companies in that direction. We are here to help. Case Study 2: The Automation Challenge This case study involves the automation of external data extraction and assembly process for one of our clients. Innovatix has been providing managed services to this client for many years, including developing and supporting several internal apps and their public website. We have also been giving integration services for their website to other enterprise apps, including Salesforce CRM and an external email marketing and delivery service. We set about trying to find mundane tasks to automate within this company, and in conjunction with the client team, we came upon the current external data assembly process. The business requires a complex data extraction and assembly process involving gathering data from multiple external FTP sites, websites, and emails daily. The data extraction and assembly process was being done entirely manually until we undertook to automate it. Here are some of the challenges the client faced with the current manual process. These had to be addressed in moving to a new automated process. Multiple Data Providers, Data Sources, Formats: Pulling source data was complicated and time-consuming. The external sources of the data had different formats, structures, and types. Moreover, once the data was fetched, it needed to be validated to make it compatible with the destination system before making it available for internal and end-users. Data Integrity, Transformation & Security: Data quality was a primary concern in handling the data from multiple external sources. Poor data quality would create a compounding problem that could lead to compliance issues. If invalid or incorrect data were passed downstream in the data processing stages, it could lead to corrupt and incorrect results, a major problem for the company. Scalability: The client is faced with significant heterogeneity of the data from the diverse sources and the need to assemble and standardize all this data into a unified data structure and system. The client is expecting to add many more data sources in the near future, which will lead to substantial growth in data volume over the current situation. To tackle this challenge, the client required us to employ a robust integration solution that can handle high volume and disparity in data without compromising on performance. Deeper Dive into the Case Study As noted above, this second case study involves a client wanting to automate and synchronize data extracts from a whole range of external sources. We automated this process using Microsoft Power Automate, our go-to automation tool[1]. There were three parts to the automation as outlined below. Each was done in succession using Microsoft Power Automate. All three automation stages are done, and the robots are in production handling the data flows. Stage 1. FTP Sites: The client connects to many FTP accounts of vendors to fetch data made available by these vendors. The first critical issue in automating this stage is security – security of access and connectivity to these data repositories is critical. The client requested a cost-effective, efficient, and scalable solution for automating the file transfer from multiple external FTP servers to the client’s internal enterprise Microsoft OneDrive platform. Manual data transfer processes are vulnerable and subject to human error, making them inefficient and often unreliable. In automating these data transfers, our requirement was to reduce or eliminate the need for manual file exchanges and ensure high standards of data security. Automating these file transfers takes the manual file exchange burden off individual team members. Innovatix implemented this process using Microsoft Power Automate SFTP connector for automating the file import process and validating files received from each of the data providers. The automation solution was set up to alert designated parties with notification emails whenever the system encountered a delayed or missing file from any one of the data suppliers. Also, the automation process significantly reduced manual verification efforts and, at the same time, restricted access of employees to multiple FTP servers. Stage 2. KPI Index Sites: The client then requested Innovatix to automate collecting and aggregating multiple KPI files and assembling the individual KPI index files into one file format (pipe delimited). Automating opening the individual KPI index files from the various providers was the key to this stage of work. The aggregated pipe-delimited KPI index files needed to be saved to the client’s OneDrive platform, and a copy had to be uploaded to an external vendor. The aggregated file included two additional columns for the date & source of the data generated dynamically when each file was received. Other fields in the data had to be updated at specific times of the day to reflect conditions at those times, instead of the values in place when the files were extracted from the vendor site. Innovatix has demonstrated the automation capability of Microsoft Power Automate in the prior stage of the project by creating automated workflows

Author: Rajaganapathy K

Maximizing ROI: The Impact of Process Automation on Business

The Microsoft Power Platform Tool Set: A ‘Down-to-Earth’ Primer

Automation of An External Data Feed Extraction and Assembly Process

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Maximizing ROI: The Impact of Process Automation on Business

The Microsoft Power Platform Tool Set: A ‘Down-to-Earth’ Primer

Automation of An External Data Feed Extraction and Assembly Process

Our Latest Post

Top 10 Custom Software Development Questions

Tips On Choosing The Right Staffing Agency

There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Testing

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