March 15, 2018

Saving You Time and Money With Robotic Process Automation

Filed under: Automation,General,Macro Recorder — Marcus Tettmar @ 3:24 pm

Before Macro Scheduler existed I was a junior member of an IT department. As part of my job I built small tools to automate specific tasks. At the time I was using VB. Each time I had to automate a task I had to reinvent the wheel a little.

The whole point of Macro Scheduler was to simplify the task of building automation routines, or software robots. To avoid having to reinvent the wheel.

There’s no reason why you can’t automate your Excel-to-SAP/WEB/ERP/ACME-Desktop-App by writing code using C# or C++. But it’s going to take you longer than using Macro Scheduler. Macro Scheduler functions like “SendText” and “UISetValue” encapsulate some pretty low level and quite convoluted code. The code wizards and macro recorders which help you use them are even more complicated.

One of the main purposes of Macro Scheduler is therefore to enable people to automate things more quickly and more easily than could be done with traditional programming tools. It makes it possible for non-programmers but also simplifies and speeds up automation for developers.

Over the last 21 years – yes 21, Macro Scheduler was first launched in 1997! – we’ve helped people with a lot of automation tasks. We offer consultancy and have been into people’s offices and also helped over the phone and remote desktop. Most routines take us a few hours to create a macro for. Some take a day or two. Rarely do we need to spend more than three days on one process, though there are some projects which involve a series of automation routines that may therefore take longer or be done over a few sessions.

To do the job from scratch with C#, C++ or VB might take weeks. Many people who approach us seem to be imagining that to automate their task may take days or weeks. They are often very surprised when we tell them it’s a few hours not a few days.

We are all about saving time and money. That’s what our tools do and it’s why we built them. Our tools mean you don’t have to pay developers lots of money to spend weeks or months building custom solutions.

The only down side to this from our point of view is that we routinely disappoint large consultancy businesses and potential partners who are used to selling IT contracts worth hundreds of thousands. They approach us thinking that there’s a huge opportunity and that we’ll pay them a large cut of a big consultancy project.

But rarely does a job require so much time, and that’s the reason we’re here. Sometimes I sense these people want us to “flesh” projects out. They think we’re “too good” at what we do. We should slow down, make things more complicated and thus charge for more time.

But that isn’t us. That’s not why we’re here or why we created Macro Scheduler. The whole ethos of Macro Scheduler and MJT Net Ltd is to save time, to find more efficient, less expensive ways of doing things that were once thought impossible or too expensive to do, and to enable people to automate without specialised knowledge.

That said we’re happy to work with companies on an on-going basis. I have found that most businesses approach us with one specific routine in mind and then when they see what can be done they realise how it can be applied across the organisation in other departments, for other teams. Saving a team one hour a week may not seem like much, but do that for 500 other teams and it adds up to a huge efficiency saving for the entire business.

If you would like to talk to us to find out how we could help your business, whether on an ongoing basis or just for a one-off job, please drop me a line here.