Automation for your business: The value of successful implementation

Harnessing the power of ‘Big Data’, alongside smart investment in digital technologies has created end-to-end transparency – and the automation of core processes for leading supply chain organizations, who have traditionally relied on manual processes.

So if some of the world’s largest manufacturers and shipping companies are successfully implementing and realizing the return on investment of digital transformation and automation, then surely your business could too? We explore what it takes to get automation right.

Solving Complex Problems With Simple Automated Solutions

If you’ve read the case study about our collaboration with Kite Pharma, you’ll not only be aware of how Proshore’s ‘Team as a Service’ can provide fast and responsive agile solutions to software development but also how automation can unlock and add value to supply chain logistics.

Kite Pharma, who provide cutting-edge cancer treatment through cell therapy, rely on a complex global supply chain to ensure the timely treatment of critically-ill patients. Due to the medical and global complexities of their services, the company needed a single system that would essentially automate the processing of large volumes of important tracking data.

With vital tracking information being communicated via emails, the organization required a system that would scan emails for relevant data and use the database as a dashboard. With high volumes of emails, and a variety of spreadsheets in place, the solution required a single piece of software that could accurately scan and extract data at scale.

In this particular case, the automated solution to the problem was fairly simple, but the impact of its successful implementation was huge, and potentially life-changing for patients.

Sometimes the best solution to a complex problem is a simple one.

Proshore helped to develop a piece of software that automated the collection of important tracking data, mitigating human input errors, and providing a dashboard with clear oversight of the entire supply chain. With an automated system in place, the client was able to drive long-term efficiencies in time and cost to help achieve improved patient outcomes.

Taking an agile and collaborative approach to automation

The key to our success with Kite Pharma was our collaborative and iterative approach toward software development that would ultimately lead to effective automation. Their stakeholders and decision-makers led the project with a clear vision of the outcome: robust and reliable real-time updates on the progress of highly important medical cargo.

From a development perspective, there were lots of complex business rules that the application needed to navigate. This required extensive discovery, navigating their systems to understand how they worked. And once they were understood, the right approach became clear.

Because we built the software step by step, iterating and testing incrementally, in collaboration with the client, we were able to ensure its robustness and fitness for purpose.

A huge amount of trust was placed in Proshore to build the system, and we were given the freedom to select the technology that would work best, in order to meet the desired outcome.

Overall, the collaboration proved that tech doesn’t need to be complex to have a huge impact. What mattered most in creating this software automation was clarity, simplicity, functionality, and ease of integration.

The Benefits Of Automation

So what are the benefits of automation, and how can we apply lessons learned to other industries? Automation is the key to making gains in key areas of your business. Wherever there’s a manual process involving data, there’s the scope to replace it using an application programming interface (API) to connect different software.

Often scaling businesses are operating ineffectively using multiple spreadsheets which can lead to duplicate files, increased potential for human error, and time-consuming extraction of data. Whilst automation can lead to resistance from within an organization, by identifying how it can resolve pain points and involving employees in its inception, it has the potential to save time and cost and enable you to maintain and utilize accurate and reliable data at scale.

Interested in automation? Find out what a collaboration with Proshore could do for your software development.