Companies around the globe are changing the way people work. Most of the companies have hired employees for some repetitive tasks that are not only mundane but also more prone to error and cost tons of dollars. So, what is the new way of working that people are adapting?
Let’s find out!
RPA – which is a shorter form of Robotic Process Automation, is a revolutionary technology that is helping businesses cut-down costs, increase productivity and efficiency through automating the tasks so the employees can focus on mission-critical tasks.
DataLime and RPA
DataLime has been providing RPA solutions to its customers for a long time, and it is one of the pioneers of RPA who are helping businesses build their Center of Excellence.
Let’s see how DataLime has helped DigitalThing with its Purchase Order Processing Task that its employees had to carry out on daily basis.
Purchase Order Processing
As already mentioned, employees at DigitalThing had to go through tons of PDF files for different clients located on DropBox on daily basis, to extract many fields like Order Number, Date, Client, and etcetera. DataLime came up with an out-of-the-box solution that takes PDFs with any structure and outputs needed data in specified fields.
The development team used Automate to develop and execute the whole project. Automate is the market-leading product that is used by many fortune companies when it comes to automating many of their repetitive tasks (payrolls, human resources, and much more). They built a configuration file that is read during script execution that is use to locate the PDF elements on the web page. Let’s have a look at how a little configuration file and web scraping did the magic.
1. Scraping the PDF Text from DropBox PDF files
This process had two parts:
- Loading Job Data from their online portal
- Going over each job to open the relevant file on DropBox to extract the fields
The team at DataLime used Automate’s Chrome Automation capabilities (as it integrates with Selenium very well) to extract the Job Data from the portal.
From the image, it can be seen that how much easy it is to create and utilize Google Chrome instances. The script was supplied with the credentials of the online portal which the script reads during the login process.
Here is the tricky part. The data contained different fields like Date, Client, Job Type, Job Reference Number, and so on. The team at DataLime created a configuration file that is read by the script in real-time to understand what text elements are to be picked and processes. Let’s take a look at the configuration file and its fields.
It can be seen that the configuration file is very flexible in terms of what the PDF text should contain, how to split a multi-page PDF and the Regex for extracting and cleaning required data. One more advantage that our client had is they don’t have to hard-code things into the script, rather they can just add or remove the configuration for different clients, job types, and so on.
After extracting all the details, it then saves the data to an output directory (selected by the user) in Excel format.
Final Words
It can be seen that RPA is so much powerful when it comes to automating repetitive tasks, be it web scraping, human resources automation, payroll generation, or anything else.
Are you a business owner and looking to automate certain things to either save money or free up your employees so they focus on mission-critical tasks. You are in the right place. DataLime gives you the opportunity to build your Center-of-Excellence where you’ll have control over your tasks, with reporting and auditing capabilities.
Contact now and boost your business here.