Have you ever sat at your computer, performing some mundane, repetitive task, and thought - there has to be a better way to get this done? Recently, our ElectroNeek Academy training team faced the task of extracting thousands of data points from one system into a spreadsheet to perform analysis.
Even ElectroNeek, vendor and developer of a leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, uses RPA bots to help perform routine tasks. The best part is - we’re a hyperautomation company and we regularly build bots to reduce human labor and error and improve efficiency whenever we need them.
The beauty of automation is you can automate virtually anything. Below is a recent internal use case, not so different than the challenges that many organizations face.
This exemplifies how ElectroNeek’s automation bots empowered their workforce with more innovative and faster work processes.
7 Days of Copy/Paste Data Entry Reduced to a Few Hours - Enabling Quick & Effective Course Management
The scenario: ElectroNeek Academy is an online RPA training platform that helps our clients stay updated on our products and solutions. In order to keep these courses updated, compelling, and delivering immersive learning, it is essential to manage the content precisely. Our instructors needed to export the entire content structure from the Learning Management System (LMS) into a spreadsheet for quick visibility and analysis of what lessons were being delivered in each course.
The challenge: The massive roadblock that slowed down the process was copy-pasting over 3,000 course details. Let alone, the amount of eyestrain it would cause, and the number of inevitable copy-paste human errors it would contain.
The solution: A parsing automation bot came to the rescue; it gets a list of URLs, browses them one by one, collects the necessary information, and adds it to the Google Sheet.
How the bot worked: The bot opens the URL of a page where the courses are listed and fetches the course URLs. The bot walks through all the URLs in a loop, uses the "Scrape structured data" block, and grabs the values of the course names, sections, lessons, and types of content. Even though the course structures are different, the bot saves them in the correct hierarchy view. When all URLs are checked, the bot exits the loop and saves the result in a Google Sheet.
A potentially frustrating and exhausting experience turned into an engaging creative task.
The results:
- The task was done in a day instead of a week.
- 100% accuracy was guaranteed in the data transfer.
- Any similar task now has a bot ready to go or be easily modified for the job.
Want to see it in action? Check out the video below.
Automation is a fun task if you enjoy puzzles. There is a certain feeling of joy that comes from seeing your bots run; running efficiently, ticking along like a clock, saving you immense time, and guaranteeing accuracy. Want to learn more about bots - check out our free ElectroNeek Academy courses.