5 Sure Shot Ways To Achieve Automation Success

The business processes and operations affect every part of a business from finance, engineers to technical support and agents on the ground. It could be pretty daunting to adjust the processes that basically forms the backbone of these functions. So, it is very important to never undertake an automation project lightly. It needs proper planning to become a success. People usually seek out automation services when they have already hit a critical point in their business operations. Their current processes are no longer manageable and are having serious revenue leakage problems.

During this pivotal moment of your business, you need your Automation project to be a success. So, how do you make this happen? Here, we are going to discuss a few of the best tips to ensure this, take a look:

1. Analyze your pre-automation processes

This will provide you with a deeper understanding of your pain points, where are they located and how exactly your business works. Moreover, it will allow you to identify the high value areas for automation. It will put you in best position possible to automate processes that fix your issues and answer your key pain points. Work with your provider and benefit from their expertize and years of experience.

2. Extreme focus

Start with setting up your goals and then stick with them. The key factor here is communication. Communicate your priorities, scope and timelines on a continuous basis to keep everyone focused. By being focused on your goals, your drive the project and the people around you. Make sure you get the best people on the project right from the start.

3. Define what you want to accomplish

You have to know what you want in a clear and explicit manner. Your provider will guide you through this on the basis of their experience and the functionality of their solution. But having a clearly defined project means everyone on board knows the details, no time wastage by meeting the deadlines and further objectives are achieved and milestones are met.

4. Benchmark yourself

Are your goals, better, cheaper, faster, achievable or what? You have to define the measurement of your success upfront. By knowing how to quantify the measures in an automated system, you will be able to know if you are succeeded or not. Moreover, you also get to know to which extent you have succeeded, how much you have saved and the revenue recovered.

5. Trust the company you choose

Automation is basically a long term investment in your business, time, money and a business partnership with the providers. As your technology and business evolve, it will help you bring profits for years. When finding the right partner, look for someone who has a proven track record of success. Research, check out their clients, testimonials and then reference check them to get the best provider.

By making sure you take care of all these things, you can enjoy the rewards of project well run and managed. If you are looking for getting your business operations automated, get a free price quote right away as VisualCron is known for its quality, experience and amazing services!

A Beginner’s Guide : Know The Need To Automate Your Business

With the advancement in the technology era, automation has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses. It provides real solutions to the problems such as process complexity and operational visibility. But what is it exactly? It is basically a process to manage data, information and processes to reduce investment, cost and resources. It further increases the productivity by making use of computing technology. To help you with the whole automation process, we are here to provide you with a beginner's guide to Business Process Automation.

Meaning of Automation

It basically means that step by step processes are getting performed automatically without the involvement of humans. It is all about converting the repetitive and tedious manual tasks into an effective automated processes. VisualCron is one such automation that automates routine business tasks through various means while achieving business wide efficiency. 

Why Automation?

Manual processes results in ineffectiveness, revenue leakage and low customer satisfaction. VisualCron offers you a wide range of benefits that are explained here:

  • Consistency and Quality - Machines are free from the interruption of different people during a task. They do exactly the same thing every time and the process gets completed in only one way. Tasks are further completed as per the specifications. As a result your customers will consistently experience the same level of service.
  • Cost Reduction - It is a fair investment initially but over time the costs are quantified. As machines run faster and longer than humans, the capital cost per task is reduced drastically. VisualCron allows you to accomplish more with fewer resources.
  • Time Saving - Manual tasks take time whereas machines can do multiple tasks at once. VisualCron reduces the number of tasks you need to do manually. This saves you a lot of time and increases productivity while allowing you to be more innovative.

These newly found savings, consistency and speed means a lot for your business in terms of:

  • It all goes a long way to increase the customer satisfaction.
  • Being dependent on people, manual processes are prone to human errors that leads to revenue leakage. VisualCron removes these factors, allows you to identify the sources of leakage and to further plug them.
  • With tasks being completed easier and quicker, it allows you to respond to your customers with more agility. You can further deliver the product effectively and at faster speed.

Things To Keep in Mind

An Investment - VisualCron is an investment both in terms of financially and time. Be aware of your processes, their working and improvement because it evolves along with your business.

Choose The Right Partner - It is important that you choose the right partner, especially where long term investment is involved.

Clarify Your Goals - Have a clear idea of your objectives and the ways to achieve them. It will ensure your success with the automation of your business.

So, these are some of the important things that you need to know about automation. If your looking to automate your business, Contact Us to get more information regarding business automation.

Understanding The Evolution Of Automation

IT companies and departments have always had a need to complete tasks faster and cut down on costs. Previously, they used job scheduling solutions and batch processing to achieve this. This would have them carrying out tasks in large batches all at the same time as opposed to one at a time.

This reduced the cost and time spent on task execution because the system was static and time/date based. It was also carried out overnight when business activities were done.

IT has evolved over the years and technology has grown in leaps and bounds, thus affecting the tasks carried out in IT companies. Businesses are also handling large batches of varied data that all require processing.

Processing systems improved with time, but were required to process multiple batches of data with different dependencies and over several platforms. Job scheduling turned into what is now known as workload automation. Workload Automation solutions are now an integral part of business operations that help to meet the data dependencies.

Efficiency vs. Scalability

The focus was getting the tasks done while saving the most amount of resources. Efficiency was essential in job scheduling but the main focus now includes not just efficiency but scalability, accuracy, speed and agility.

It all comes down to great automation. IT departments are faced with complex data every day and manual manipulation would take lots of time and resources that could be used to come up with better solutions to improve business processes.

With increased data flow over the years, different departments are more reliant on IT to help solve their internal issues. The HR department, for instance, would require the help of IT to onboard new employees or generate reports. While the interdependence and collaboration is commendable, it reduces efficiency and beats the whole purpose of automation.

Self-Service Gets More Done

This has lead to the introduction and uptake of self-service automation solutions. It is basically where other business users that aren’t IT staff are able to carry out their own activities without direct involvement of IT.

It makes other business users more productive and much less frustrated as compared to when they have to wait for IT to get to their ticket. IT staff also benefits from this with reduced operation issues to handle. They can focus their attention on overall productivity of the systems and ways to make them better and more efficient.

The business demands are rising day by day, but the manpower to keep up the business needs in time is lacking. Skilled IT individuals are much fewer and harder to find and this always increases their workload almost tenfold. Enabling all other staff to carry out their everyday processes without IT staff is definitely a win for any business.

Big Data, Complex Processes and Automation

Automation tools of VisualCron don’t require any programming skills whatsoever, to use. They help control workflow, handling errors, a large number of tasks, and room for some programming interaction for those who can handle it, all on a simple interface. They facilitate the improvement of business processes at any given time thus improving efficiency and productivity all round.

With the increase of data from all quarters, data analytics is inescapable. Wearable devices, social media platforms and other sources all provide big data that must be sifted through to be put to good use. Workload automation must adjust accordingly and stay reliable throughout so as to execute the complex workflows arising from it.

Automation is here to stay and can only get better just as it has over the years. Big data, big implementation strategies and better automation solutions to execute all of it seamlessly is the future of automation. Order your needs today from VisualCron and get your business automated for an efficient working environment.

Manual Vs Automation : Database Cluster Management

When it comes to managing a cloud infrastructure, management of persistent data is the most challenging part. Persistent data in this case is basically any data that should survive the destruction of a cloud environment.

Since you can easily reconstruct your software, simple configuration files, and operating system; they can’t be termed as persistent data. Only the data you can’t reconstitute qualifies as persistent data and this data stays in your database engine.

The problem ensuring database consistency isn’t unique to the cloud. Well, the cloud creates a new challenge to an existing problem of backing up a database, since your database server in the physical environment is more reliable than the database server in the cloud. The virtual server that runs your database can likely fail completely and with no prior warning.

Whether physical or virtual, when the database fails, the files in the database are likely to get corrupted. And the possibility of file corruption is dependent on the database engine you’re using. Nevertheless, it can happen with any engine.

Avoiding Data Corruption

The most reliable mechanism you could use to avoid corruption is to leverage the abilities of a database engine that does support clustering. A clustered database environment is one in which several database servers do work together as one logical database server.

In such an environment, a transaction performed to the cluster will still survive even if one node fails. Clients of that database won’t be able to tell if a node went down, and will keep operating.

Organizations continue to demand huge data storage spaces, scalable and flexible productivity systems and fast data synchronization.

Therefore, cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive continue to provide an exceptional service that creates files and folders with many inbuilt sharing features. VisualCron works effectively with each of these cloud platforms and allows you to sync things easily.

Download and Upload Capabilities

In Cloud Automation, there are two essential features: uploading and downloading. With the downloading feature, you can have access to your files and file clusters using a shareable link.

On the other hand, the upload feature keeps a copy of your local data in the cloud, making it easy for you to have remote access whenever you want. If by accident, the data is lost on the local servers, all you need to do is to relax and download a copy of data that was initially uploaded to the servers.

Manage Files and Folders

What’s more, you can go ahead and create, rename or even delete a number of files and folders. The cloud services come with inbuilt tools that you can use to read the data.

VisualCron’s automation lets you upload and download files and folders easily; you just need to define a rule or task. The execution of the task will take place within the time preferences defined by the user.

The Power of Automation

When it comes to cluster database management, data automation has several features like data backup, fixing schedules, automatically running scripts, process execution and killing, registry updates, creation of system log information, file and folder copying, deleting and renaming files, and so forth. Only an organization can fully understand the need and power for automation. Businesses of all sizes have embraced this contemporary technology and keep using it.

The Place of Manual Data Input

It is worth noting that data automation isn’t applicable on every function and rightly so. Some functions may require manual input of data, and will only be constructive if handled manually.

Most importantly, data Automation saves organizations a lot of time that could be spent executing several tasks. Such time can be channelled towards managing other processes which require human intervention.

Organizations treasure their data, as they can use it for reference purposes. It is important to ensure that the management can access the data when required. Data automation is paramount as it makes data management effortless. With the automation features of VisualCron, the work at the workplace will become more easier. To get a Free Price Quote, get in touch with us today!

It’s Time You Renovate Your Organization With Self Service Automation

One of the major buzzword in the IT community nowadays is self service automation. It may seem foreign to some people but actually it is a part of our everyday life. From ATM, self checkout lanes to automatic doors, self service automation technology is everywhere. It has been further adopted by industries as a means to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Although it is being used widely by businesses, the IT sector hasn’t embraced it.

Self service Automation is basically revolutionizing the way people across the entire company do their job. You need to realize that offering end users self service automation that is VisualCron, can significantly benefit the different departments and the organization as a whole. Let’s take a look at these benefits:

  • End users as well as IT departments will experience the increase in efficiency and time savings. It is all the result of faster management and execution of requests.
  • It further provides the organization with resources and to process traceability as well as transparency.
  • Non IT users will be able to resolve the problems and stay updated with information without the constant support from IT. It will provide more time to insight and promote a better partnership between end users and IT.
  • Organizations will get to experience an overall improvement in their productivity.
  • With the management of IT services, there would be positive end user experience.
  • VisualCron enhances the quality of the service which means happy end users.

Over time, it is becoming a widely known fact that VisualCron provides an organization with many benefits. The question that is still in people’s mind is what is it exactly? VisualCron basically empowers non IT departments and users by providing them the ability to proactively take on ad hoc and daily processes.

Reliance on IT intervention leads to inefficiency and frustration on both parts. Through VisualCron, you empower business users to accomplish the day to day tasks and process on their own. It will save the IT department’s time that they can put into more critical tasks. Self service automation basically allows the end user to resolve the problems  independently. It can also be used as a proactive means to transfer ownership from IT department to end user. Be it for development, production or test tasks, effective IT service management starts with automation solutions and self service.

Conclusion

Over time, with the increase in the amount of technologies, it is harder to find the right IT staff and in right quantity. With the help of VisualCron, you can offload many of IT department's daily tasks, making the handling of human resources a bit easier.  It further facilitates a business in being more productive while providing with more time to focus on core areas and further the IT and non-IT collaboration is improved and strengthened.

5 Reasons Your Billing Reports Require Automation

Meticulosity is necessary when it comes to billing as the smallest of mistakes can bring severe impact on the bottom line of your business. The billing process of goods and services is a taxing process which involves huge stacks of paper and the challenge of managing the information, not to mention the large amount of man hours and efforts it requires. With the number of transactions being too high along with volumes of data and information processing, it is the perfect opening for errors to creep in.

Automated billing reports eliminates any unexpected errors while providing transparency and efficiency. Crystal reports Automation is one such example to make it happen in your business. Through this blog we will help you in providing an insight, regarding the need of getting your billing reports automated.

#1 Unexpected Irregularities

To correct any irregular billing errors is a daunting task as once you have released the batches, trying to correct them can lead to a domino effect which in a way ruins the whole billing cycle. The management of all the information that is stored at different places is like a nightmare, especially when they can't communicate with each other. VisualCron makes the extraction and sharing of data an easy task while making the process faster and eliminating these unexpected irregularities.

#2 Decision Making

An invoice needs approval for payment after it is being received. Some invoices  may require signatures while others need proofs to be validated, which could lead to suspension or denial of payment. Through VisualCron, you can match the invoices to orders during the capture process itself. Decision making becomes easy and instant as invoices can be reviewed and signed by the authorized parties from even remote locations.

#3 Transparency

Revenue leakage is a growing concern of the business houses. To firstly identify and then to eliminate the causes of revenue leakage, requires high levels of transparency. With VisualCron, you can configure your billing reports in such a way that the information is optimized, creating complete transparency. You can have the information however way you need. Analyzing of trends and spotting errors is an added advantage of VisualCron.

#4 Detail as well as Value

Without automation, a huge amount of time is spent majorly on processing, handling management and enquiries that is prone to errors and is time consuming. VisualCron allows you to focus on the areas that requires special attention and closer inspection. With this customized automation, more time can be spent on finding ways to add more value to the business and to follow a proactive approach towards the work, errors and roles.

#5 Compliance and Audit

Digital storage of information provides the proof and makes the tracking of information quite accurate and fast. Not just internal tracking, it also provides digital trail in mere minutes with the detailed information of what, who, when and why of it all. This way, VisualCron keeps everyone in the information loop and helps your company to comply with the rules and regulations along with the audits to meet the requirements.

All in all, VisualCron facilitates consistency, accuracy and completion. So, as the aforementioned reasons bring forward the need of automation, get your billing reports automated instantly!

2 Ways To Rationalize The Cost Of Automation

Automating business processes is a great way to reduce the manual labour costs and the use of resources while doing more with less. It all sounds amazing and worthwhile goals for any business. But the problem is, in order to achieve these goals and to automate our businesses, it requires money, time and efforts and further comes with its own set of risks. Therefore, the benefits from investing in Business Automation Software must be all clear. The things is if the costs of automating the business do not match up or exceed the benefits received, then there is no use or need of automation.

#1 Tangible ROI

Tangible ROI is basically the traditional form of calculating the ROI. For instance, you are spending x amount of money and in a particular period of time and getting y amount of money. If y is more than x, then the recovery time of y is reasonable and a wise investment. And the opposite holds true, in case y is lower than x, the investment made by you is just wasting the time, efforts and money without giving anything substantial in return.

This calculation of ROI is simple enough and very essential for business to determine what will be the costs to go forward with the project along with the returns and time period of the recovery of investment. In the similar manner, VisualCron automates your business and pays off your investment.

#2 Intangible ROI

Intangible ROI is inclusive of benefits that may or may not directly convert into money calculations. It is more of a subjective exercise, for instance on automating a process an employee can go home on time and spend time with his/her family instead of working late in office. It is a little difficult to calculate as not all benefits and values can be translated into completely monetary computations.

As the benefits of  intangible ROI are not clear cut or quantifiable, you can’t put a dollar value to it. But still, it can be measured as these benefits are equally compelling and can give significant reason to invest in the Automation. Happier and healthier employees are always more productive and miss work less often. Intangible ROI is not monetary in its composition but deals with the matters of subjective nature that equally contributes to the development of business. And through VisualCron, you achieve the intangible ROI, making it a coveted automation technology.

Justification

ROI plays an important role in making the purchasing decisions, so let’s take a look at a few things regarding making an investment decision and calculating ROI:

  • ROI not only justifies an expenditure but also discourages it on the basis of its benefit and value to a business.
  • Intangible automation may seem not that important, but it also provides powerful justifications that affects a business on an intrinsic level.
  • One more significant thing is there are other ways to calculate the cost of an activity in terms of indirect and hard costs.

Thus, in terms of rationalizing the cost of Automation, VisualCron has been know to provide a better ROI in both tangible and intangible form. So, make an order and help your business in reducing the manual costs and improving the productivity.

5 Reasons You Require Process Automation To Solve Business Problems

The business world is hyper competitive today and surviving in this requires resource optimization and strategic planning. Cost cutting is one such method that is widely in use by the business houses, much to the result of this tough environment. And this is where Business Process Automation comes into play.

There is no limit to the benefits business process automation provides in terms of  saving time and money along with much more. But there are many issues that are recurring which VisualCron quite efficiently solves. Here are the business problems that it helps in tackling and resolving:

  1. Manual Filing and Reporting

There is a huge amount of data and information present in a department which is transferred to other departments on a daily basis. This makes the whole communication process a taxing and lengthy one. As reports are generated manually, there are high chances of errors. VisualCron basically automates and manages the documents and their generation, compilation and storage. It will save thousands of your human hours spent on manual work.

  1. Cost Factor

Cost cutting is one of the sad situation going around in the companies. Eliminating redundancies and reducing the headcounts is one of the effective ways to do this. But it could lead to compromising in quality. The another reason being human errors costing business too much money. VisualCron is one such Automation for your business that will not only reduce the costs but also maintain the quality to provide the best customer satisfaction.

  1. Rapid Business Growth

With the company growing at a faster rate, the number of tasks and the complexities also rise with it. But it requires more number of readily available resources along with more staff. But not all business houses are interested in doing this, may be to increase the profit margins. This is where, VisualCron, plays an important role as it automates the time consuming tasks and allows you to focus on more important matters.

  1. Complex Processes

Being many groups for similar work, there is usually no set or consistent way of working. It usually happens in multi-regional organizations. Standardization is the best way, if the company wants to improve its efficiency and wants one best answer for all. Business process automation is one such solution to manage your services worldwide, have centralized information and to deal with exceptions as well as queries more effectively.

  1. Compliance

There are certain rules, regulations and practices with which, businesses have to comply. Complying with these multiple regulations can put a strain on the resources of the IT department. Security and data protection regulations are further met with the help of VisualCron which provides application integration paving a way for encryption and automated data queries. You can also prepare annual or quarterly reports by setting up the software according to your requirements.

Business Process automation is your answer, if you are suffering from any of these problems. With VisualCron, you can grow your business through resource optimization and more time on your hands to focus on important areas. So, know more about us and Get A Price Quote for your business today!

The Evolution Of Job And Task Scheduling Over The Years

When we talk about evolution of job and task scheduling, it is vital to understand the meaning of job or task scheduling at first. Do you remember the childhood days when your teacher used to come around your school desk and check your homework on daily basis. Such things still happens in our daily life where we or someone keeps a check on some task that is either initiated or in process till the completion. Our life consists of various hierarchies and so is true with the virtual world we are living in parallel. Computers is making the age more advanced and nearly everyone uses it for some sort of task execution. It can be preparing a file for your seminar, or creating a music playlist or scheduling task for your employees in an enterprise. Even though they all sound different, the overall idea remains the same.

Here is where the Automation was required. The manual intervention and efforts have already paid a lot and it certainly became impossible to keep the track of each hierarchy in the virtual systems. Hence the automation was introduced in order to make our life simpler and easier. Now, you must be observing the role of automation in daily tangible life but we would restrict the concept till virtual platforms i.e. computers in this post.

The idea was absolutely marvellous but implementation became a challenge for developers for years. Over and over they tried and dealt with the error and software functioning and thus, the evolution of Task Scheduler took place. We don't generally realize the fact but yes, it took a lot of time to reach the comfort we are enjoying due to automation.

Automation softwares are used in the enterprises for plethora of tasks like assigning jobs to employees, collecting and maintaining databases, copying and pasting files to various repositories over the web and local data storage mediums, backing up the data on regular basis without kick starting each time, generating reports and a whole lot of such tasks.

Even the windows users are using great automation software like VisualCron that can easily take care of almost all the windows tasks process even when they run in background as well as foreground. Automation does not stop us to become better but it always saves a lot of time and resources that can be used elsewhere. Automation is not just limited to the local but the cloud platform is equally managed by it. Cloud systems are more in demand as they have given enough proof of reliability and functioning in the recent years. Along with it, the daily tasks as small as starting and stopping the system functions can be easily dealt with the use of automation software like VisualCron.

The idea of automation is globally accepted now and we will definitely see a time soon where every other task whether virtual or real would be conducted using the automation.

Robotic Process Automation : A Way To Save Your Company’s Cost

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a new trend in the technological environment that makes use of a software comprising artificial intelligence(AI) along with the capability of machine learning to handle tasks that are repeatable, monotonous and are large in volume that were once required a human to perform.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)Basically it implies the configuration of a computer software to record and interpret the existing applications to process the data and transactions, manipulating them, triggering responses and communication with other digital systems.

How To Save Your Company Costs Through RPA

A company that uses labour for general process work on a large scale and where employees are performing high volume transactional functions can benefit a lot from Robotic Process Automation (RPA) by cutting on their cost and time. You can make this all more efficient by employing Business management software to further add to the effectiveness of your whole organization.

The various cost reductions performed by RPA are described here:

IT costs - As this technology makes use of software to perform certain functions and business processes, its main concern roams around IT realm specifically. The performance of RPA depends upon the platform you have installed for it. As the more sophisticated the platform, the more efficient and high volume workflow it would be able to perform. This would result in more impact to the IT department and reducing its further costs.

Business Costs - RPA makes a huge as well as lasting impact on business world by reducing the need to outsource the work. RPA is far more practical approach and further makes it possible by working much more efficiently and effectively in terms of better security, reduced errors and greater scalability.

Development Costs - RPA has the ability to perform effectively along with getting implemented in mere weeks. It also provides rapid return on investment which adds to its quality. It doesn’t require any re-engineering as it doesn't replace the existing systems along with providing the benefit of cost capitalization to your business.

Licensing Costs - This application software requires one time licensing payment instead of continuous payments. It doesn’t require any ongoing professional services but rather just the maintenance of licence cost. RPA doesn’t even require much training, you just need to provide your employees a minimal training in the beginning.

Practices In Relation To RPA to Help Your Business Grow

RPA doesn’t guarantee success, there are many organizations that fail miserably by adopting this, you just need to adopt some practices for the positive impact. You can make your business grow with a positive impact by following these practices which are mentioned here:

Involvement Of The Whole Team - It is not a responsibility of any one department although IT section mainly deals with this. Keep the whole team in the loop to ensure that you have covered every angle and base.

Self-Service - Your main goal to get on board with this process is to maximize your efficiency and productivity levels. Self-service is the best and right tool to achieve these goals. Try to incorporate as much self-service as possible to save your end user time and to provide your IT personnel’s efforts and focus.

Implement And Measure Adoption - People doesn’t cooperate well with changes at least not everyone and RPA is a challenging task. You need a strategic plan to smooth out this process of adoption of RPA and measure the level of acceptability to solve out any problems and weaknesses that may arise.

By applying these practices you can grow your business with the help of RPA as you can mange your business much more efficiently and effectively through Business Process Management Software. This all will help you in growing your overall business. If you are looking For RPA for your business, you can avail our services at “VisualCron”, you may  Contact Us and take your business to new heights.

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