Robotic Process Automation (RPA) boils down to simply automating repetitive tasks, especially the ones where we as professionals add little value in the outcome. The benefits of automation over manual work are obvious and plentiful: time saved, the ability to scale a process or delegate ownership, and reduced risk of human error are just a few justifications for investing time in automation. Often we see our customers implement automation through code like VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros, BAT (DOS/Windows command batch) files and PowerShell scripts. However, this route often creates new challenges such as heavy reliance on fragile scripts and technical know-how that is often hard to pass along: software developers call this Technical Debt. QueBIT offers a line of products to provide you with supported tools that help you automate everything from loading data and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to report distribution and workflows for data collection, without the Technical Debt. QueBIT Euclid Studio allows us to automate data flows, ETL and layer-in predictive analytics while QueBIT ReportWORQ (which is the main subject of this article) now automates data contribution (input forms) and PowerPoint presentation generation in addition to its popular Excel, PDF and HTML report distribution features for data sources such as: Workday Adaptive Planning, IBM Planning Analytics, Excel and Microsoft SQL Server.
As professionals the exciting and fun part of our jobs is identifying and solving a great challenge that helps drive our business and make us better. However the daily grind keeps us from finding the time and energy needed to be innovative and forward looking. Personally as a software engineer I look to automate every non-fun part of my job (and my life) so I can focus as much effort as possible on solving these challenges and feeling the reward for doing so. Automation brings scalability, consistency, maintainability and definition to the things we do. I could come home at the end of the day and say “I spent the day building personalized reports for all 100 of our business leaders today”, only to have to say it again next month. Or I could come home and say “I spent the day building a system to send reports to business leaders and it doesn’t care how many of them there are”. Clearly the latter is the leader, the innovator and the one who’s going to make a difference. We built ReportWORQ to enable you to build a system and make that difference.
