Advanced Excel Automation in the Enterprise
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•839 views
Microsoft Excel is widely known for its ability to store, organize, and manipulate data. Business users around the world use Excel as their go-to data solution. But relying on Excel also usually involves spending time manually keying, re-keying, copying, pasting, or reformatting Excel data. It doesn’t have to be this way. Watch the webinar to learn how you can easily automate Excel processes, including: Reading, writing, and validating data for accuracy Integrating with other applications and databases Building Excel spreadsheet transaction hubs Appending or update data in existing spreadsheets Extracting and migrating data All without writing a single macro or being proficient in Visual Basic. Join this webinar to empower your teams’ daily Excel spreadsheet processes with automation. Your vendors, customers, and employees will thank you.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Advanced Excel Automation in the Enterprise
Similar to Advanced Excel Automation in the Enterprise (20)
More from HelpSystems
More from HelpSystems (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Advanced Excel Automation in the Enterprise
- 1. Back to Basics Webinar Series: Advanced Excel Automation for the Enterprise
- 2. Your Presenters Director of Document Management Richard Schoen HelpSystems Pat Cameron Director of Automation Technology HelpSystems
- 3. Today’s Agenda 1. HelpSystems overview 2. Common Excel processing issues 3. Excel automation use cases 4. Introduction to Automate capabilities 5. Demo 6. Q&A
- 4. Broad Solutions in Growing Markets Secure • Risk Assessment • Anti-virus • Security Event Monitoring • Identity & Access Management • Compliance Reporting • Managed Security Services • Professional Security Services • Managed File Transfer • Encryption Inform • Enterprise Data Access • Mobile Data Access • Operations Analytics • Executive Dashboards & Reporting • Data Warehousing Automate • Workload Automation • Business Process Automation • Network Monitoring • Message & Event Monitoring • Performance Monitoring • Data Backup Management • Remote Monitoring & Management • Capacity Planning • Document Management
- 5. HelpSystems. All rights reserved. Common Excel Processing Issues
- 6. • Receiving daily reports Excel, CSV, Text, PDF, Excel, Etc. • Lots of copying and pasting • Data reformatting and organizing • Appending existing spreadsheets • Updating existing spreadsheets • Validating data against database • Adding additional columns • Re-keying of data Common Excel Processing Issues
- 7. • Extracting data from databases • Receiving as email attachments • Downloaded from a web site • Report file from application • Results from queries • Network directories • Other departments How Excel Files are Generated or Received
- 8. • Learning VBScript is painful • Logic is embedded in spreadsheet • Macros can be dangerous • Security settings must be enabled • You want repeatable logic • Don’t want to program • Need easy data validation • Re-usable business logic More Macros Is Not The Answer
- 9. Benefits of Excel Automation • More time to service customers and vendors • Less stress and fatigue • Reduce burnout and repetitive injuries • Increase data entry accuracy • Eliminate re-keying of data • Increase job satisfaction • Retain skilled employees • Get more done with existing staff
- 10. The Received Report Processing Pattern Report, CSV, or Excel file received Lookup, review, or copy/paste performed Data entered or updated into one or more systems Report, CSV, or Excel file is saved or archived
- 11. The Received Report Processing Pattern Report, CSV, or Excel file received Lookup, review, or copy/paste performed Data entered or updated into one or more systems Report, CSV, or Excel file is saved or archivedX X X
- 12. HelpSystems. All rights reserved. Excel Automation Use Cases
- 13. Use Case: Read Excel File and Write to Customer Orders Table Customer OrdersImport Customer Orders Automate Data Validation / Check Customer Info
- 14. Use Case: Use Excel File as Source for Managing User Onboarding Onboarding Process Employee List Automate
- 15. Use Case: Perform Active Directory Auditing Perform Active Directory Audits Audit Report Automate
- 16. Use Case: Update Excel Files where Template Format is Mandated Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Annual Documents Specific Formatting Rules
- 17. Use Case: Read Customers Table and Write to Excel Customers Export Customers Automate
- 18. Use Case: Convert CSV File to Excel without Re-Keying Update Spreadsheet Received CSV Transaction File Automate
- 19. Use Case: Read and Process Excel Files from a Directory • Monitor • Transform • Process • Copy • Read • Convert • Write • Archive • Replicate • Delete • Sync • Distribute Automate FTP Network Local List Process
- 20. Approach to Defining Automation Tasks • Create an outline of manual steps • What does the human do? • How much can we automate? • Process is consistent • Follows a general predictable pattern • Can be automated
- 21. HelpSystems. All rights reserved. Introduction to Automate
- 22. Our Differentiation Start anywhere, realize value today, and expand anytime. RAPID TIME TO VALUE LOWER TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP COMPLETE SOLUTION BRIDGING IT AND BUSINESS 600+ pre-built actions Drag-and-drop builder Visual workflow designer Priced as software—not digital workers Low training burden Low scaling costs Automation across the full spectrum of enterprise needs Enabling platform that is powerful enough for IT but intuitive for business users Customer Value Support & Maintenance Model Build NetValue Scaling Costs (Hardware & Software) Reliability Purchase Price Time to Value Functionality Usability & Training
- 23. Complete Solution Offering BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY IT PRODUCTIVITY Individuals & Teams Business Applications Systems & Infrastructure Front-of-Glass Automation Back-of-Glass Automation Document Management Enterprise Job Scheduling Secure FTP Monitoring Start anywhere. Realize value today. Expand anytime.
- 24. Bridging IT and Business • Low-code Environment • Reusable Components • Extensive Online User Support • Simple Deployment • Web Scraping & Interactivity • Back of Glass: APIs, Web Services, SOAP/REST • MS Integrations: Outlook, Excel, SharePoint • Cloud Capable: AWS, Azure • PDF Reader/OCR • Rules, Variables, Calculations, Exception Handling, and Triggers • Scale from POC to Enterprise Deployment • 3-Tier Architecture • Agent Groups • Centralized and Secure Repository • Role-Based Security • Full Audit Trail • Secure Deployment • Supports DevOps Approach • Operations Console • Active Directory (Role-based Access Control)
- 25. Rapid Time to Value No Code 600+ drag-and-drop actions with business designed easy-to-use interface Visual Design Workflow designer allows for process visualization allowing optimizations to happen on the fly Extensibility Universal connector provides organization extensibility to build connections today and tomorrow Reusable Components Easily build a library of templates that can enable automation build speed
- 26. What is a Dataset? • Dataset surfaces lists of data • File and folder listings • FTP directory listings • Database records • Excel or CSV file contents • Email message lists • Records can be processed individually
- 27. The Loop Action • Use to process lists of data • One record at a time • Iterate through dataset list results one record at a time • Access individual fields • Can limit to first result or first xx results • Sort results
- 28. Conditional Logic • Make your tasks smart • If/Else/End if • Select/Case/End select • Call logic for each row • Call subtasks • Perform validation
- 29. OpenDocument Spreadsheet Actions • Microsoft Excel not required • Faster than Excel actions • Excel formats supported XLS, XLSX, XLSB, XLSM • Open Document Spreadsheet–ODS • Comma separated variable–CSV • Open, create, or close workbook • Add, rename, delete, move, copy sheet • Get, set, insert, and delete cells • Single action to write file from DataSet
- 30. Excel Actions • Excel automation • Excel is required • Run macros • Open, create, close, and save workbook • Add, rename, delete, move, copy sheet • Get, set, insert, and delete cells • Single action to write file from DataSet
- 31. Excel Templates • Use existing workbooks as templates • Pre-format cells • Fonts, color, and other formulas • Any embedded macros • Just about anything Excel supports
- 32. HelpSystems. All rights reserved. Demo Time
- 33. HelpSystems. All rights reserved. Questions and Answers
- 34. Thank you for attending! Next steps: Don’t forget to attend next week’s webinar: Automate Data Scraping & Extraction for Web and More Thursday, Sept. 20 Website: http://www.helpsystems.com/automate Telephone: US Sales: 800-328-1000 Outside US: +44 (0) 870.120.3148 Technical Experts: richard.schoen@helpsystems.com pat.cameron@helpsystems.com
Editor's Notes
- As I mentioned I am Richard Schoen, Director of Document Management Technologies here at HelpSystems. I am part of the technical solutions group bringing topics like this to our customers and prospective customers. I have over 30 years of background with IBMi, Windows and Linux platform software development, managing and delivering forms and documents, helping customers implement paperless process, and implementing process automation to make their days easier. My co-host today is Pat Cameron our Dir or Automation. Good morning Pat. Thanks for joining me today. Why don’t say hello and tell us a little about your role here at HelpSystems.
- Our agenda today will hopefully provide a good introduction to HelpSystems, AutoMate and using the software to streamline excel automation. Todays session will start out by reviewing a few of the common problems Excel users have when trying to process their data. Then we will talk about some Excel automation use cases. Then we’ll do a very short introduction to Automate’s many available Excel friendly capabilities. And after that we will do a short technology demo with some Excel automation samples. We will end with a few minutes of Q&A and a review of our polling questions. Feel free to enter your questions in the chat window as we go and we will address them towards the end of the webinar. Select “All Presenters” so the questions are directed directly to me and Pat. We’ll also plan to complete our session in about 30-40 minutes so you have plenty of time to make your next important meeting. Also todays event is being recorded and you will receive a link to the webinar and samples to share with anyone in your organization who couldn’t attend todays session.
- Before we get things rolling, a little introduction to HelpSystems and what we do. HelpSystems has been in business for over 35 years providing solutions for every day business automation needs. Our solutions help customers Automate their daily operations including: system management, network and infrastructure monitoring, business and desktop process automation and report and document management. We also help customers Secure their networks and business systems from cyber attacks and help companies maintain compliance. And we help keep users and management Informed all day long through the use of our business reporting, data warehousing and executive dashboarding software products. Our solutions can be deployed across multiple platforms including IBMi, Windows, Linux and AIX.
- So let’s talk about some of common excel processing issues your teams are dealing with.
- Our users are receiving information on a daily basis in many formats such as Excel, CSV, Text and even PDF. Then the data gets transcribed in to one or more systems by copying and pasting the data, re-keying information and often running custom macros to format or re-organize and re-save the data. I can’t count the number of accounting and finance teams I’ve talked with over the years who have built their entire reporting infrastructure around Excel macros. Often spreadsheets need validation of information in the tables before importing information to ERP systems or maybe a spreadsheet needs to get added to or updated during a process to aggregate data throughout the year. I’m sure all of these common issues sound very familiar. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let’s talk about some of the common things we hear about when customers are looking to automate their database driven tasks Need to quickly extract data from a database for report generation in Excel, CSV, Access or text formats. Many customers have the need to extract data on a regular basis and send that data to end users, trading partners and customers. By creating a re-usable task in Automate to accept a database connection string, SQL query, output file name and delivery destination your team can quickly create tasks and workflows to distributed information from your database without re-writing business logic over and over. Read an incoming , Excel, CSV or other data file and insert or update the records to a database table. Often we receive information either via FTP, Email or download from a trading partner web site that needs to get imported into our corporate databases. You can write automate tasks and workflows to automate the entire sequence from end to end. Download the file or detach it from an email message. Read the file line by line and then compose insert, update or delete statements to place the information into a temporary table for further processing or directly update a production table depending on the complexity of the transaction. You can also validate data as it is read and written to the selected destination table to make sure only clean data gets imported. Perform ad-hoc database queries and updates Often there is a need to perform quick updates to status fields or other fields in a database in an audited fashion. You can build tasks and workflows that update a selected record set and then capture the audit information to a custom SQL database log or some other logging system to make sure the updates were audited. ETL or data transformation. Read data from one database and summarize into another database. Often we have the need to summarize daily sales and other information so that we can provide management with the information they need to make daily decisions. Being able to use SQL statements to summarize and extract data daily is a great way to keep management in the loop on daily activities within the business. Need to schedule and run SSIS and other database utilitites. Often you may already have daily business logic that is being run by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or via stored procedure calls to an Oracle, IBMi or other database server. Being able to quickly schedule and work with your existing business logic from an automation task is a great way to put better management behind running your database automation and extraction tasks. These are just a handful of the common database use cases available for use within the AutoMate and BPA server software. I’m sure you’re already thinking of interesting ways in which your team can use AutoMate to streamline existing daily processes.
- Excel files can get generated and processed using many methods. Often data gets extracted directly from a database to Excel for creating output to send out to a vendor or customer or for internal reporting. Or a spreadsheet may get read and transcribed into a database. Files may come in via email from a customer or from a system such as Salesforce.com, ServiceNow or some other system that generates CSV or Excel reports that need to be processed. Or you may have a scenario where someone needs to go out to a trading partner web site to download files daily. I recently talked to a new Automate customer who previously had to download over 3000 invoices per month and had someone who spent at least 2 hours per day doing that work manually until they implemented Automate. And of course our files can often come in from FTP sites or other local network directories and processes.
- Continuing to use macros is not necessarily the right long term answer. Much of your business logic is typically embedded in to an Excel file if you are using macros. Logic is possibly spread across multiple macro files. And it’s not always easy to customize macro files. You also have to give permission for Excel to use macros and with todays level of viruses and ransomware, care must be taken not to run infected documents. One of today’s examples will provide you with an alternate method of taking logic from your macros and embedding the VB Scripting into a repeatable VB business module within Automate.
- These are the many benefits to Excel workload automation. The number one benefit is providing more time to service customers and vendors and keep them happy. Without happy customers we wouldn’t be in business and without happy vendors we can’t purchase the products or materials needed to keep our customers happy. Data entry accuracy and entering data into one or more systems without re-keying or copying/pasting information is another primary driver and benefit of automation as well. Lowering stress and fatigue and reducing job burnout, boredom and repetitive injuries such as carpal tunnel is also very important. I’ve talked to customers where they have had to rotate employees between doing mundane data entry and more meaningful work throughout the day to prevent burnout and turnover of skilled employees. There are still some people out there who love heads-down data entry, but in today’s world, keeping our skilled employees productive, happy and appropriately engaged is paramount to retaining them. And finally being able to get more work done with our existing staff is a good thing and allows a team to grow with the same level of staff. Often the additional data entry tasks end up being an added burden to already busy knowledge workers daily work loads. By automating data entry workloads staff can stay focused on the important work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reduce burnout and repetitive injuries Increase data entry accuracy Eliminate re-keying of data Increase job satisfaction Retain skilled employees Get more done with existing staff
- Let’s take a quick look at an example of something knowledge workers do throughout the day that some of you may identify with. I call this sample work pattern the Received Report Processing Pattern. This is a mind-numbing manual scenario where a report or work is received in a CSV or text file, Excel worksheet or a PDF document and all the items in the report need to be reviewed and processed manually. The user opens the report and prints it. Or they start working through the data line by line. Hopefully they have at least two monitors to work with their data. For each line entry, they perform some data entry or other work (possibly in another system) or maybe data gets copied and pasted to a new report or spreadsheet. When the work has been completed for the list, the original report and any new documents may get saved for archival and audit purposes. And maybe the final results get uploaded to another system for back end processing. The mouse was invented to be helpful for interacting with the desktop, but manually copying and pasting lots of data between applications is not the way to be doing important daily work unless there’s no other way. Fortunately there is.
- Since this report processing task is driven by a consistent, repeatable list of information it’s a good candidate for robotic process automation and eliminating all the manual steps. Now when the report gets received, the user can save the incoming report file to an input folder for automated processing. Or if the report comes in an email, an email box process monitor can grab the report and save it to the input folder to get automatically processed which means even the first step could be automated even though we’re showing it here because many people like to still manually receive the files until the process has been fully tested and trusted. Assuming the review and data steps we eliminated were repeatable, the new process simply runs in the background via an AutoMate robotic process agent and then the results are automatically entered or updated into the back end systems and the files are archived and audit trails created during the process to document what work the robotic process completed. And if process notifications are required the process can send out notification and completion emails, update database information or other systems to audit the work that was completed so all business systems stay informed of the work being done automatically. This is a great way to improve the daily redundant work processes done across various departments within the business.
- So let’s talk about some of common excel processing issues your teams are dealing with.
- Pat This example shows an Excel file being received and then processed by Automate. The data is read from the Excel file and then written in to a database. This is a common use-case used to import received data. <tr>One of the other cool things a process can do is cleanse and validate data as it’s imported. This could mean checking a list of values for accuracy or matching or adding data from additional databases tables.
- Pat Another potential real-world use case for reading an Excel file and processing data might be user onboarding processes. The HR or IT team may maintain a spreadsheet or database of active and inactive employees. For onboarding, an employee may get added to a spreadsheet file and then an automated process can create the <tr>Active Dir user,<tr>the exchange or office 365 mailbox, <tr>and then add the user to any downstream application using a combination of Automate actions, web service calls, database calls or user interface automation. For offboarding, the process normally starts with simply disabling the users active directory account, possibly moving them to a disabled user group and then eventually deleting their profiles. ------------------------------------------------------------- Talk onboarding and storing users and statuses in a spreadsheet and updating that spreadsheet. Also talk generating audit reports by querying AD for user profiles not recently used. Talk about adding users to AD, sending out passwords and also adding to other business applications or sending out notices of onboarding work to be done like requisitioning a new laptop, office space, cell phone or other tools to get the job done.
- Pat For those who have to regularly generate user reports for auditors and other departments, this shows an example of possible querying Active Dir for a list of inactive users perhaps. Let’s say you need a weekly list of user profiles who have not been used in the last 30, 60 or 90 days and you need to generate it automatically. Automate can facilitate this type of process on a scheduled basis or the process can be run on-demand.
- Pat Often states and other government entities provide sample templates where data must be captured and aggregated in the correct format. By using a supplied template your team can easily automate the adding and updating of records within the pre-defined template format and save a new version daily, weekly, monthly or annually so nobody has to do this work by hand. I worked with a property management customer in Michigan who was mandated to send specific spreadsheets to the state for their reporting every month and prior to automating the process they spent several hours each month creating the spreadsheet and had to manually verify and validate the data entry to make sure there were no errors. The process went from several hours to a few minutes after the process was automated. There’s huge time savings to automating these types of templated, repeatable data entry tasks.
- Pat This example shows an Excel report document being generated directly from a database table. Any database can become a source for an Excel document by simply specifying a database connection string, a SQL select query statement and an Excel output file name. After a document has been generated, it can be sent via email, placed into a network folder, uploaded to a Sharepoint site or saved in a document management system such as our WebDocs software.
- Pat This example show an inbound CSV file. Often CSV data needs to get translated into an Excel sheet and then re-saved to Excel for processing. With Automate it’s a trivial action to be able to translate from CSV or other delimited formats such as XML or even PDF directly in to an Excel file. Spreadsheet rows can also be updated along the way if necessary so a spreadsheet becomes a living document within an Automate process. Data might also get read from the CSV for other input file and entered directly into an online application to prevent re-keying.
- Pat As excel files are received they are often placed in to a folder on the network file system or in a FTP location for processing. It’s very easy to create a smart process that can monitor for files to come in and then automatically transform them into an appropriate format. And then process the transactions and enter them into the appropriate system or reformat the output for archival or distribution. Just about any process you need to accomplish with inbound files can be completed from start to finish with ease using Automate.
- Let’s take a quick look at the requirements gathering process when starting to create a new Excel or other automation task. This requirements process can be used for any task you want to automate. I always tell people to create a simple bullet list or outline of the steps for a desired automation task. In other words: what does the human doing the work do today ? Based on assumptions and talking it through, you have to determine can a chosen task by systemized for automation ? Ex: Can task inputs be driven from an email message, help desk ticket, file or database ? What kind of decisions have to be made in the task and does the task need manual input most of the time or not ? Is the process consistent, predictable and repeatable every time ? If so then chances are the process can be automated whether it’s an email task, a browser interaction task, file transfer or some other automation process. Gathering task business requirements not only helps your team determine the manual steps that need to be automated, but you can decide whether your internal team members have the skills to build help desk automation tasks or whether it’s more efficient to utilize the HelpSystems service teams to build out automation workflows for you and then provide training once live. We can provide as little or as many services as your team desires. We always want to make sure the customer can decide how little or how much task building they want to take on themselves.
- When an Excel, CSV or Database read operation returns resulting data for further processing it’s returned into an object called a DataSet. For Excel think of the dataset as an array of all the records you just requested from a spreadsheet that contain data. Once you have received a dataset result you can process the dataset individually line by line. You can also choose just to process the first record from a dataset if you’re just trying to validate record existence or expecting only one record to be returned such as a customer record or order header record. And if you need to export to Excel or CSV you can accomplish that using a single action within an AutoMate task to export the entire contents of a DataSet. DataSets also work well for listing local, network and ftp directories for processing. And for an email message list, the data set contains a list of email messages and their properties for processing. Email usually consists of from, to, cc and bcc addresses, subject line, body text and any attachments. You can also apply logic such as record validation at the line or record level as well so processing spreadsheet lines is very granular and very flexible.
- The loop action is an important action used to iterate or spin through the records stored in a data set. The loop action can also be used to process text files or in memory strings line by line as well. Quite often a loop will process all records in a dataset until there are no more records. Other times you may want to selectively pick off records for processing based on status flags or other values. You can also use conditional logic to accomplish selective processing within a loop. ----------------------------------------------------------------- There are some common data fields available in every recordset including: theDataset.CurrentRow-Number - The current row that will be accessed in the dataset by an expression that does not contain a specific row index. theDataset.TotalRows-Number - The total number of rows in the dataset theDataset.TotalColumns-Number - The total number of columns (not including the static columns) in the dataset. theDataset.ExecutionDate-Date - The date and time the dataset was created and populated theDataset.RowsAffected-Number - The number of rows affected by an update. theDataset.SQLQuery-Text - The SQL Query that was used to generate this dataset (If a SQL Query was not used, this value is empty). theDataset.Datasource-Text - The data source used for the SQL Query, if applicable. theDataset.ColumnNames-Text - A comma-delimited list of the column names in the dataset
- By using conditional logic you can make your tasks and workflows extra smart Using If/Then/Else statements and Select/Case/End Select statements you can make important decisions within your tasks. Decision making can be made within a Loop or anywhere within the task allowing you to easily implement task decision making as needed to help your processes flow correctly. You can also call subtasks from within a task to perform additional business logic that you may have modularized such as record validations, lookups and more. Make sure to take full advantage of the business logic available within your automate tasks and workflows for processing Excel and other files.
- It’s important to be able to read and write to Excel files from an Automate task or workflow. Automate has built-in native actions that can be used to read and write to Excel files using our built-in opendocument spreadsheet actions which don’t not require Excel. It’s very easy to read a query result into a dataset and then use a single action to write or append the dataset contents to a new or existing Excel file. I use this all the time when performing SQL queries for easy export to Excel.
- The classic Excel actions are still available as well if you prefer to do Excel automation using Excel or if you’re calling macros. The OpenDocument Spreadsheet and Excel actions will no doubt be used a lot if you’re extracting data to spreadsheets or reading, processing or updating spreadsheets on-the-fly.
- If you have formatting requirements for a spreadsheet, the best way to accomplish that is to create a pre-formatted template with some of the formulas and logic built-in. Then Automate simply adds or updates data in the template. A common thing for accounting teams to do is to summarize rows and columns or maybe show negative numbers in Red so they stand out.
- Now we’re going to take a quick look at some AutoMate samples. Sample 1- Read a Database With Sql and Extract to Excel Sample 2 – Read Access Database Table1 Write To Table2 Sample 3 – Read Database With Sql And Extract To CSV Sample 4 – Read CSV File And Write To Access Table2 Sample 5 - IBMi-Run Stored Procedure-TESTCL1
- OK, now we’re going to take time for a little Q&A. When entering questions, please remember to Select “All Presenters” so your questions are directed to me. I will also now display a short poll that we can share with the group, so if you don’t mind answering that would be great. Which database drivers are supported with Automate ? Pretty much any driver that you can use to build a connection string. This would include MS Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, IBMi, etc. As long as you have a valid database driver available then Automate should be able to work with it. You will need to be careful and use 64-bit drivers if using the x64 version of automate and use 32-bit drivers if using the x86 version of automate. In the case of IBMi I generally recommend users utilize the x86 version because the client access database drivers are 32-bit. When I create a new automation task, what’s the best way to trigger it ? It all depends. If an end user needs to run a task from their desktop they may need an Automate agent installed and they can trigger a task interactively. If a task will use a database or other file as an input source the task can be scheduled to run every few minutes or once per day as required or can be triggered with the database trigger we discussed earlier. The nice thing about building tasks in Automate is that you don’t have to worry about building polling or scheduling into your task. You design tasks and workflows as single pass and the triggering mechanisms in Automate handle polling and other task kickoff methods for you . We receive daily order data via email in Excel and CSV format and need to import to our ERP system. How would you design a task to do that. In this case I would create a task that polls an email box regularly and processes any inbound emails that contain attachments. As an email comes in the automation task would grab any file attachments and then read the contents of the file and place data in a directory for import by the ERP system or possibly import the data directly to an import database table before processing. An example of this would be JD Edwards has file that they call Z-Files which are mean to receive data and then JDE processes and validates the files before importing data. We have to regularly log into a trading partner web site to download files for processing. How might you design this process ? Many trading partners are using services such as Ariba or they have their own home grown sites where files are downloaded from rather than being directly emailed or set up on an FTP site for download. While Automate can handle pulling or pushing files from FTP or email, web site interaction is becoming more common. The process might look like this: your team receives a daily notification of available file downloads via email. Then someone logs into the web site, navigates to the appropriate page and then downloads a file and the processes it. This entire sequence can be automated using a combination of our email actions to monitor a mailbox, GUI interaction actions to log in to a web site and finally the file system, Excel and database actions to import and process the data. This pattern can be applicable to processing inbound order information, accounts payable invoices and more.
- Thank you for attending our webinar today. *Attend Part 3 in the webinar series next week (Thurs, Sept 20) We hope you learned some helpful information about how you can use AutoMate to streamline many if not all of your tedious Excel automation and processing work to keep your employees from going insane. If you have an Excel task you’re looking to automate feel free to schedule a free personalized demo and our team can show you the best way to automate your most painful Excel based processes. Simply visit helpsystem.com/automate and fill out a request form today. Also if you have any additional questions on Automate or any of our other software products, please reach out to the sales team or feel free to email me or pat and we can connect you with the appropriate sales or support team members. You will also receive a link to this recording so you can share this webinar with those in your company who could not attend today’s session. Again thank you for attending todays webinar. Have a great day and enjoy the rest of your week. Pause for a moment. Stop screen sharing Save polling answers.