Your ERP is up and running, staff is clattering away on their keyboards, and data is pouring in. One of the great things about an ERP system is that business logic can be baked into the screens, so when a user updates a product it can revise sales orders, or alter the Gender Ledger. Then you notice it takes 38 keypresses to edit the price of a single item. Your staff might be fast, but when they have 20,000 skus to update this is a serious problem. Now what?
Automation just might be the answer. Software can drive your ERP terminals and/or website and be given dozens, hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of transactions to perform. The same keystrokes you rely on staff to enter can happen in a fraction of the time, in the background, and without typos. If the amount of data is large enough to require significant time, users can be notified by email, teams message, text, or any other medium of your choosing when the work is complete. Automation systems run 24/7 and can be set up on dedicated machines, freeing up your own
Past projects have involved automation with a variety of Mainframe systems including VAI, DMSi, and Open Systems, as well as Web versions of VAI, DMSi Agility, and Openbravo. This solution leverages “Human Interfaces” such as reading the contents of the screen and sending keystrokes, which means it is always 100% compatible with what you would train your users to do
As a perk, you can also convert automation scripts into training documentation and SOPs, and run automation scripts against test environments to test software upgrades