In today’s scenario, one of the most sought after buzz word has been “Automation”. There has been different ways by which different people are trying to automate their processes.
It’s been observed, oftentimes, either these processes of automation are either complex to implement or expensive.
However, in Analytics Educator, we have successfully automated some of the processes using an inexpensive method which is quite simple to implement.
There are some of the MIS teams, who create several reports using MS Excel on daily and weekly basis.
There has been a particular method, which had been paved to follow religiously, to create all these reports.
The time to create these reports usually ranges from 30 minutes to 3 hours 30 minutes or sometimes may be more.
We have created an algorithm where we have translated all the instructions, to create the report, into the form of a programing code.
When an associate wants to create the report all he has to do is to keep the raw files into a particular folder and trigger the program, which would take the data from the raw files, follow the instructions already programmed into it, and create the report in the exact desired format into the same folder.
It has been observed and validated that the automated process can curtail down 99.1% to 99.8% of the original time. Eg. A report which normally takes 3 hours 30 minutes can be curtailed down to 30 to 40 seconds with 100% accuracy.
The software which has been used to automate the processes is called R which is a freeware.
R can be installed with normal Microsoft Windows operating system and it doesn’t require any extra hardware to be implemented.
R can even work in a computer having a RAM of 4GB or even 2GB. Hence, there is actually no extra cost required for the infrastructure to implement this process.
Moreover, R is an open source software, and the capabilities of R is evolving and increasing with each passing day.
Clearly the scenario is too premature to predict that which single automation method will prevail and reign supreme in the years to come. However, the vital statistics of automation method using R (Ease of Using, Price Tag, and Automation Algorithm) gives us more confidence to put our bets on it.