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Manual processes are costing you time and money
Blog / Technology

Manual processes are costing you time and money

Pull’s Senior Developer, Tom Wiles, wants to save your business money. Here’s how.

Last week, Pull completed a technology project for Crimestoppers, the UK’s independent crime-fighting charity. On the surface, the project’s sole purpose was to deliver functionality that they mostly already had, with only a handful of new features.

Had we gone mad? Are Pull now in the habit of delivering seemingly useless projects for our clients? Of course not! What we did with this latest project is completely change how Crimestoppers used its system: taking slow, manual painful processes for their users and either automating them or making them far, far easier to use. For Crimestoppers this was a particularly important as it can now process anonymous crime information from the public at a faster rate. With Crimestoppers’ call centre staff recording over 1,000 reports a day, speeding up this process can have genuinely life-saving consequences.

But it’s not just Crimestoppers that could benefit from this sort of project. Manual processes are everywhere! Put simply, they’re any task that doesn’t require human intelligence to complete:

  • Regularly having to copy and paste data from one application or system to another

  • Using multiple applications when one could do the job

  • Formatting exported data to make it more presentable

  • Regularly producing the same graphs and reports from your company’s data
 

Earlier this week, I was in a kick-off meeting for one of our beauty clients and, in passing, someone mentioned that in order to update their company’s product catalogue it took someone a full working day to move some data around from one system to the next. An arduous, boring, repetitive task that was being performed by someone relatively senior who had far better things to do within their business. And this was a task that had to be performed regularly. Now, many businesses just accept that this is the way that’s it’s always been done and always must be done, but as we showed with Crimestoppers, these types of problems can be easily solved.

There seems to be a very real fear that the aim of automation is to make workers redundant, but for a lot of scenarios that just isn’t the case. It’s more about making your colleagues more productive. Letting them focus on things that really affect your business and giving them the time to be more proactive for your business. The client I was speaking with was being held up from doing the valuable things to deal with the mundane things. I could see the glimmer in her eye and the hopeful stare when I told her that we could help.

I’ve no doubt that someone in your business right now is copying and pasting some text from one of your internal systems to another. They’ll have done it a hundred times today already. And every working day for the last year. At Pull, our expertise – along with partnerships with the likes of Microsoft and Kentico - means we can transform how your business operates using technology, eliminating these manual processes so that your staff can work on more productive tasks. And trust me, they’ll thank you for it.

Posted 1 July 2019 by Tom Wiles

 

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