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Programming Businesses Software IT Technology

Automation in the Workplace? 82

Posted by Cliff from the let-your-computers-do-most-of-the-work dept.
thefluxster asks: "The company I work for considers efficiency and automation two of the most important standards to live/work by while employed for them. To further this cause, several individuals have been employed specifically to design and implement various programs, scripts, and (where APIs aren't available) macros designed in Macro Express 3. Using these methods, the group has been able to shave very significant amounts of man hours off various projects. To the Slashdot community I ask: What, if any, applications, processes, etc. have you or your company put in place to increase productivity?"
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Automation in the Workplace? More

Automation in the Workplace?

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  • I think it's a good idea. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Friday May 06, 2005 @06:51PM (#12458105)

    <humour>

    After all, we have many automatons here where I work....it seems to work out great!

    </humour>

  • RAM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kaamoss ( 872616 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @06:53PM (#12458124) Homepage
    I work for a RAM manufacturing company right now. I've developed an applescript testing utility that we use to test memory on the mac laptops we have which has sped up how we used to test it...by hand...tremendiously. I also wrote a java/cocoa app to manipulate a mySQL database where we store info about all of the ram that comes / goes through our engineering department and interfaces with a twain scanner so that we have a photo of the modual attached to each record. This has really sped things up when people ask about a certaint modual we gave a customer 4 years ago as opposed to digging through THOUSANDS of hand written pages. I'm glad I took the time to do that on my own as when my 90 day review came up I was able to get a damn hefty raise for the work I had done to speed things up. Just think of the most time consuming, mundane, repetitive task which you do and try your best to efficiently automate it. I'm sure you're effort won't go unnoticed.
    • Applescript is an amazing productivity enhancer. Even for small tasks.

      Also, it's modularity aides in developing more complex scripts based on many smaller scripts.

      At my job, in the Art Department, I've written a series of scripts for automating our outsourcing procedure. All you do is run it on a job folder and it takes the active files, copies them to an outsource folder, labeles the folder for the vendor, opens the files allowing us to create outlines of the fonts and do other preflighting to the file,
  • we each regenerate in a cybernetic alcove for 3 hours a day. the rest is spent working. collectively, you might say our efficiency is through the roof!

  • Organic Automation (Score:5, Funny)

    by littlerubberfeet ( 453565 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @07:11PM (#12458292)
    Interns, my friend. Interns.

    • Re:Organic Automation (Score:3, Interesting)

      by oneiros27 ( 46144 )
      I'd like to build on this, in all seriousness.

      If you remove all of the monotonous tasks, then you run the risk of every person needing a significant level of ability for the whole system (department, company, whatever) to operate smoothly.

      Unfortunately, those were the types of roles that you'd typically use for interns and other inexperienced employees. You could see what their learning ability was, and how out how well their work ethic and personality meshed with the organization.

      By over optimizing, yo

  • Sarbanes Oxley (Score:5, Informative)

    by LordStrange ( 19871 ) * on Friday May 06, 2005 @07:17PM (#12458336)
    My otherwise lovely company, in accordance with the vageries of SOX and the retards from http://www.deloitte.com/us [deloitte.com], is rather more interested in slowing things down.

    How many of you are experiancing THAT?

  • Everywhere I possibly can (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Automation and efficiency is the only way to live. I will spend days to automate something that would take me 5 minutes each and every day to accomplish manually. If I see someone doing something really inefficently, I will equally spend days setting up something so they don't have to waste hours every day or week. Two days of my time that saves them 2 days a month of their time is worth it. I'll do it in my own time if I am too busy at work. I figure I have saved several man years in the past five yea
    • Embodiment of the principle: Work smarter, not harder.

    • Automation is not without it's limitations... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Automation and efficiency is the only way to live. I will spend days to automate something that would take me 5 minutes each and every day to accomplish manually.

      If you spend, say, 3 days at 8 hours a day to automate something, in order to save 5 minutes/day, you'll need 288 days just to break even on the time you've spent. If the system you're automating changes every six months, the 3 days you spend setting up the automation ends up costing you time.

      Consider your second example like this:

      Suppose you d
      • Here [findarticles.com] is a great example of automation gone overboard. The McDonalds automated kitchen. Considering what all the machines and maintenance must cost, would it really save money compared to paying minimum wage employees? Maybe so, but I'd be surprised to see the savings pay off anytime soon. In countries with lower labor costs, like many in South America, almost nothing is automated. Parking lots have attendants, subway and bus fare cards are sold by humans and not machines, there is no self-checkout, and most

      • Consider: 1) Turnover, 2) Inelastic resources. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @03:55AM (#12460838) Homepage

        Everything you said is worthwhile to consider. However, there are two factors you didn't mention, turnover and inelastic resources. When you implement automation software, the amount of automation does not change. All that happens is that a machine is the robot, not a human.

        Humans have a low tolerance for being robots, especially those who can think well enough to be useful in an office. So, you left out a cost of not automating: After a year, Jenny gets tired of being a robot at your company and gets a job being a robot somewhere else. That way she is at least able to experience a change of environment. The cost of finding and hiring and training another Jenny is $6,000. That's another big reason automation software pays for itself.

        But, as they say on those late-night pushy commercials, that's not all. Jenny's manager supervises her and 5 others like her. It's a serious pain to manage 5 humans who are largely being asked to be robots. So, there is high turnover among managers, too, when there is low machine automation.

        Another huge factor is inelastic resources. You may want Jenny to accomplish more than is possible for one person without automation. You may not have enough office space for another Jenny, or enough human resources to train another person. You may not be able to find someone who can truly replace Jenny, who is very loyal and knowledgeable about the myriad of details in running a business. The problems associated with inelastic resources can get very expensive.
        • "Humans have a low tolerance for being robots, especially those who can think well enough to be useful in an office. So, you left out a cost of not automating: After a year, Jenny gets tired of being a robot at your company and gets a job being a robot somewhere else. That way she is at least able to experience a change of environment. The cost of finding and hiring and training another Jenny is $6,000. That's another big reason automation software pays for itself.

          But, as they say on those late-night pushy

          • To an extreme degree, the U.S. culture is not one in which a business leader finds a way to automate and then decides to take life easy. The U.S. history is one in which efficiency has typically led to expansion, sometimes huge expansion. Henry Ford, for example.
          • >Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing >jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business.. >With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest >efficiency.. That's not at all clear. Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to us to decide what that means. (And maximizing profit for investors by
            • Doh! Sorry about the stupid formatting in the above. Fixed version follows

              >Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing
              >jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business..
              >With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest
              >efficiency..

              That's not at all clear.

              Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to u

  • A Serious Reply (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TFGeditor ( 737839 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @07:36PM (#12458467) Homepage
    I worked for a couple of decades as a consultant to design and implement solutions of exactly this type.

    In one case, a computer manufacturer was functionally testing motehrboards on the bench, employing dozens of technicians. For each board tested, setup and teardown (plugging in/unplugging power supplies, drive cables, keyboard, monitor, etc.) was about 7 minutes per board, test time about 3 minutes, total 10 minutes per board.

    I designed an interface utilizing "pogo pins," a.k.a. "bed of nails" in a vacuum actuated interface adaptor to connect all the peripherals, effectively redicing setup/teardown to zero, plus eliminating the wear-and-tear on connectors, both on the motherboards and the peripheral cables. Tes t time went from 10 to 3 minutes per board.

    You can see what this did for throughput, plus 1 person/test station could now do the same work in the same time as previously required 3 people.

    Needless to say, I was a hero--and invoiced accordingly.

    • Re:A Serious Reply (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @09:17PM (#12459139)

      1 person/test station could now do the same work in the same time as previously required 3 people.
      Needless to say, I was a hero--and invoiced accordingly.

      And then got your ass kicked in the parking lot by the two guys who just lost their jobs!
      • "And then got your ass kicked in the parking lot by the two guys who just lost their jobs!"

        Give this man a +10 Clairvoyant!

        Okay, maybe +1 Funny, but the fact is, he ain't far from wrong, and it was more like 17.
        • "Okay, maybe +1 Funny, but the fact is, he ain't far from wrong, and it was more like 17."

          Seriously?

          • Re:A Serious Reply (Score:3, Insightful)

            by TFGeditor ( 737839 )
            It was more of a "menacing crowd" and a "stern talking-to" rather than an ass-whipping. But the potential was definitely there. I think the reason it didn't devolve into that was that a security guard showed up.

      • And then got your ass kicked in the parking lot by the two guys who just lost their jobs!

        It's a funny comment, but it I'm suprised by how many people actually think that way.

        If the automation increases productivity then it increases your companies competitiveness. That makes more financially feasible for salaries to rise at the company. At my work it would only mean that the other two could focus on other higher-level tasks. Of course, you have to wonder if the company will just pocket the increased pr

        • It is correct in most cases. Automation right now can remove the tasks that any idiot can do, but the harder, more expensvie tasks are not automatable. The people who do those jobs are often people who don't have the mental ability to handle more complex job.

          Anyone (with minimal physical abilities) can place tab A into slot B all day on an assembly line. No brain power required at all. No anyone can program the robot that does it in their place, nor can most people fix that robot. Even if they co

  • Everything (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @07:40PM (#12458486)
    I write AppleScripts, Perl scripts, full GUI programs, Excel macros, constantly. Whenever there's something I can automate now to save time later, I do so. Things as mundane as a droplet for adding a prefix to a filename all the way up to frotzing tens of gigabytes of data at a go, all gets automated.

    My work mantra is to make the computers do things that computers are good at, and free up the humans to do the things they're good at. Seems to work for me. . . since I've taken up that policy, both the quality and quantity of work that my team can do has increased appreciably.

  • Believe it or not... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...I actually replaced somebody with a very small shell script.

    Okay, I didn't, but it was close. I was doing web development, and a client was spending a lot of money (close to 100K) for what was actually a pretty basic website. The thing that bumped up the fee a lot was that they had fortnightly events, and a member of staff had to travel to various places in the country, get the material, and update the website.

    Of course, the half-hour script I wrote relegated his job to merely dragging a file from on

  • Well, here's the source to my latest... (Score:3, Funny)

    by google ( 125927 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @08:13PM (#12458705) Homepage
    /*
    * Class: Automaton
    * Automates most business processes, including
    * project management and tracking, billing,
    * compiling and linking, and makes your coffee
    * in the morning.
    * Author: Jack Foo
    */

    public class Automa^H^H^H^H
    Mr. Foo has been relieved of his duties. `Automaton` will be available for download from MarketingSpeak soon ... the best job security a manager can buy!
  • In some companies there is actually a resentment on the part of management against "clever" people who automate too much. One place I worked at specifically stated that no shell scripts, aliases or utility programs could be worked on or installed w/o management approval. All the developers ignored this of course and did whatever they had to.

    It's easy to see this as a simple grudge between different classes of workers, but I think it actually came down to the fact that automating too much prevented middle
    • There may also be some concern about 'code' that hasn't undergone rigorous testing and kitting, not to mention any concerns about an auditor highlighting that as a SOX violation.
      • The shell script that accomplishes task x and the assignment of a team of people to accomplish task x really should go through the same level of testing and compliance checking.
        • True, but often times the assignment of 'keep this running' is viewed very differently from the script that runs out of cron that 'keeps this running'.
    • Jeez. Makes one wonder what management was smoking to make them resistant to improved productivity.

      And I identify with the "greybeard" reference.
      • Makes one wonder what management was smoking to make them resistant to improved productivity.
        Or what they weren't smoking, perhaps. People often have their own agendas that don't necessarily involve what's best for the company. If manager X could get a few more heads by not automating stuff, more power to him and his career.

  • dev tools (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wfeick ( 591200 )
    I've tied together the web interfaces for various pieces of our development environment (links back and forth between a bug report, a stack trace decoder, CVS commit logs, and viewcvs code deltas). For the stack traces, the binary does a CRC of each file loaded into the memory map, and reports crc:offset for each return address from the stack. This allows us to automatically identify which build of the software was in use, and then retrieve the appropriate data to decode the stack trace into something huma

  • Best Windows Automation Tool? AutoIt? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @08:30PM (#12458797) Homepage

    I'm very interested to know which are the best automation programs and macro programs for Windows and for Linux.

    Is Macro Express [macros.com], mentioned in the Slashdot article, the best?

    For Windows automation, I've used the free AutoIt [autoitscript.com], which is amazingly complete and well-developed. AutoIt comes with an autocompletion IDE [autoitscript.com] that automatically displays function usage information. The version that includes the IDE installs easily. AutoIt also has a compiler, which is also free.


    I used WinBatch [winbatch.com] several years ago, but I had a huge amount of trouble getting technical support for it.

    Microsoft has released several scripting languages, but my experience is that they are poorly documented.
  • Where I work, time saving methods are discouraged. Middle management thrives on head count, and time savings could lead to reduced head count. I wish I was kidding.
    • I know the feeling. At a previous job, my boss (the IT manager if you can believe it), required that I *not* automate *anything*.

      There were, I think, two reasons -
      1) He wanted as many people under him as he could get. He was, after all, a power hungry little pain in the rear (I was there before he was hired, so he had nothing to do with my getting the job)

      2) He didn't understand what the heck was going on. He was a paper MCSE who thought he was up on the programming side of things because his wife was

  • AutoHotkey is excellent (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikkoApo ( 854304 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @09:13PM (#12459114)
    At home I use the free tool called AutoHotkey [autohotkey.com] which automates most mouse & keyboard actions to a script. Uses its own language so you can easily improve the recorded script yourself. You can also compile the macro scripts to executables. On top of that the source code is downloadable. Very sweet tool indeed.

    At work automation isn't that well known, but I'll probably try to improve things next summer. Once I had to learn & teach the graphic designers how to use photoshop's batch functions. We had to convert 700 images from hi-quality to web quality and they were going to do it by hand. It took about 15 minutes with a script.

  • My company had made their own debian distro for all desktops and servers and I put together a collection of cfengine, bash and perl scripts to convert those debian machines to cluster nodes (master or slave) and compile kernels, etc ... Impressive, huh? Wanna hire me? :)

  • cron is a great application (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) * on Friday May 06, 2005 @09:26PM (#12459195) Homepage
    I love getting morning emails from it telling me how well it did my job while I was asleep.

  • Pragmatic Automation (Score:3, Informative)

    by bokmann ( 323771 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @09:27PM (#12459204) Homepage

    If you write software, take a look at the book Pragmatic Project Automation [pragmaticprogrammer.com] (I think it was reviewed a few months ago here on /.)

    It is geared a lot towards Java projects, but there are some philosophical nuggets there for any project.

  • Two things come to mind ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by richg74 ( 650636 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @11:49PM (#12459864) Homepage
    Speaking from a system developer's perspective, there are two techniques that I think are not used enough:

    Use Configuration Files / Tables Intelligently
    Sometimes applications that need to process data from a variety of sources can be made much easier by spending a bit of time designing configuration resources. This can include designing "little languages", incorporating tools like lex and yacc.

    Example: We once had to build a system to process real-time market data feeds from a variety of sources. The sources sometimes changed the format of their feeds, and we had to add new sources semi-regularly. Fortunately, there was a great deal of logical commanality among the sources. We wrote a little language which could be used to describe a source, then processed that to generate the server configuration tables automatically. That meant quicker turnaround and fewer errors with many fewer code tweaks.

    Use Existing Tools
    There is no need to re-invent the functionality of a packaged application that you already have.

    Example: We had to generate transaction confirmations in a variety of forms, depending on factors like existing/new customer, applicable law, type of transaction, etc. The data was all in a database, but the text pieces got changed fairly frequently, since it was a new business area. We used a database extract program together with mail/merge in a commercial word processor (WordPerfect on Unix) to generate the documents. That gave much quicker development (no need to write formatting / text manipulation stuff), with the added advantage that the end product was a directly-printable document that could be easily edited by hand in case of last-minute changes.

  • Data Channels (Score:3, Interesting)

    by basking2 ( 233941 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @11:57PM (#12459902) Homepage
    One of the dangers of automation is that when machines start to handle data the people forget it. On some level that's the point, but on another level it's important to have documented somewhere /how/ your automation does what it does. A second key to making automation a big time saver is marry its input/output to a standard and shareable data communication medium. What I mean by that is have it able to do reports and accept commands from something like a web browser, e-mail, or RSS feed. Also, consider how you might automate the automation. That is to say, if you have a large testing system with many configuration options, developer A may only use 3 configurations. Make it easy for him to reconfigure the system and launch his tests or builds or whatever with a small script it only took him 10 minutes to put together. Finally, make the log chatty! :) If you're automating something non-trivial it's a great idea to have a readable log to go back to when something breaks. These are some non-obvious things I've learned from using an in-house automated testing tool that I spent far too much time reverse engineering than using. :\ * They did get the chatty log part down. Saved me loads of time. * They offerd reporting in XML but didn't make the file trivially accessible. (Doh) * They didn't offer any method to easily automate the automation. My testing time was cut from 5 hours to 20 minutes when it could have been cut to about 1 minute. Not a HUGE savings, but significant *and* it cuts down on the distraction of thinking about how to set up the automation for task A or B. Hope this helps. :) This is maybe more of a lessons learned than a dirrect reply to your question. Sam
    • Ugh, I apologize for the above formatting. I'm getting a little too used to web forums and blog interfaces.
    • Credit Checking.
      In relation to " One of the dangers of automation is that when machines start to handle data the people forget it", I have found it almost impossible to find out how my credit-score is worked out. Anyone I ask tells me "the computer figures it out". More detail usually stops at "Your credit history is taken into account, along with your current financial status". Big News.
      I assume that anyone doing credit checking will not want to disclose thier exact algorithms, but it is disheartening to a

  • Dependant on workplace (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Grand ( 152636 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @12:13AM (#12459979)
    I work for a smaller company that does online sales. As the business grows and more orders that come in during a day, bottlenecks start to show. We identified the bigger bottlenecks and instead of throwing people at them, we decided to automate with computers. I sat at the desk of each person and watched them work for an hour. As a programmer, you can easily see things that you can script, store, and transfer using computers. Even little things can make the world of difference when people do the same thing over and over.

    Now this is with a small company that had almost no automation what so ever. Everything was done by hand, everything was printed, everything was passed around the office. You may have it different where bottlenecks dont show themselves so easily. My advice would be to sit at peoples desk and watch them work.
  • On Windows AutoHotkey [autohotkey.com] is a great GPL automation tool. Anyone knows a similar tool for Linux with such capabilities?
    • Sure. Bash, Perl, Python, ksh,...
      On of the UNIX principles is (or, rather, should be, because it seems sometimes to be forgotten) : under each GUI you have a CLI. Then you don't need to automate a GUI. Scripting give you much more freedom and power.
  • We use this... mostly in conjunction with our main HIS (Healthcare Information System(?))... I work at a hospital. You can, and I do, use win32 API's within scripts that you can embed in the jobs. This is sometimes necessary when trying to accomplish things that their pre-built steps can't accomplish. For the most part, it's a really nice product. Each job is set up as a task, with drag-n-drop stuff like send keystrokes, wait, move mouse to position x/y, ftp stuff, write to files, etc, etc, etc. You can
  • Google for Motorola's Digital Six Sigma. Think of it as automation and enforcement of business, product and quality processes, automation of process change, and reporting using "digital cockpits".
    • Unfortunately, I couldn't tell what I was looking for from the descriotion you gave. If this is a product, I missed it. If this is a process, I found hundreds of examples which are pretty cool, but nothing specifically on office automation.

  • The obvious (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dubl-u ( 51156 ) *
    What, if any, applications, processes, etc. have you or your company put in place to increase productivity?

    I found I was spending a lot of time writing good slashdot comments. But Slashdot has so many dupes and near-dupes that it was worth doing a little keyword matching on my previous highly rated comments and reposting them. It works pretty well; this is time 7.0000000 for this comment.
  • Our company wrote its own development tools. We have a generator for large SQLXML queries, one for diverse types of databases (MSSQL, Oracle) and are currently testing a javascript code generator.
    The advantage of all these fine tools is that it enables us to make big things in little time. :-)
  • The World Wide Web has enabled a huge increase in productivity in many businesses by enabling them to, in a sense, be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and by making the browsing and ordering process something which could be done remotely, without involving a salesperson.

    Actually, I see all business to business interactions as being definable by rules sets..

    Even bidding and haggling can be defined algorithmically.. as can the process of recognition.. vision.. OCR is one example..

    The really interest
  • Hey...Microsoft said it would do it, so I guess it must be true.
  • Where I earn a living there is hardly any time to put into practice, much less think of, any time-saving automation projects.

    I guess it's a management issue, but I for one would really like to improve productivity within my organization - if only I had the time.

    • Then might I suggest you look for a new place to earn a living. The key to automation is that laziness is a virtue. Sure all that info is in the database, you know where, you have to run this query, get the results, then run a sub-query on all those results and click click click, ah there's the answer. You want to do three queries then manually do umteen more queries to get your answer? Are you being employed to do queries or to find answers?

      What you have to ask yourself is, "What am I doing every single t
  • Statistics collection and design of experiments. How else do you know how often to test and what's worth testing?

  • WAN equipment maintenance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @02:15PM (#12463083) Homepage
    When I first went to work at a large international Frame Relay/ATM/IP data network provider (use your imagination), they performed all their routine maintenance operations manually. They literally had a large network operations center filled with tier-1 technicians. We would print out lists of commands with WAN switch names; they would login to each and issue the commands.

    Aside from the many typos, this was obviously limited in scale. Each switch model had a unique user interface - some straight TTY, some ncurses-like vt100 screen addressing - that made maintenance confusing and error prone. I created a script in TCL/Expeck/TK that allowed command execution automation (with a nice GUI, stored procedures, detailed audit trails, etc.) and parallel execution (e.g. command execution on 100 switches at the same time).

    With that script, any authorized individual could execute a dozen commands on a thousand switches in a couple of minutes, something that would have taken days if performed manually. When I left, it was being used not only ad-hoc for maintenance activities, but cron'd for things like data collection, equipment inventory, equipment status monitoring. It was also used to automate testing, as stored procedures could be collected and kicked off against the test networks. Usage had grown until it basically had its own 8-way Xeon machine, running flat out almost 24x7.

    Also, note that software development wasn't part of my job function, though I was an experienced software developer before joining the organization. Simply in terms of the equivalent manpower, that one script saved the company tens of millions of dollars/year. Our equiment vendor liked it a lot and was authorized to use it on our network for specific activities. They even offered to buy it at one point for a 7-figure sum, but were turned down; after all, it provided a competative advantage.

    In return for the development, I received a 50 dollar gift check, and the upper level manager that presented it was confused about what the recognition award was for. That wasn't the first time something like that happened, and it wasn't the last.

    The point of the above isn't to blow my own horn, it's to demonstrate that people rarely appreciate the value of scripts/automation.
  • In my current capacity as a magazine editor, after a few thousand manuscripts I came to recogmize I was performing the same series of keystrokes over and over during the dditing process (mostly related to formatting). I now have approximately 12 MS Word macros that perform these taskes with a couple of keystrokes on my part.

    I have similar formatting "algorithms" (okay, macros) running under MS Excel that puts text into the correct order, form, and format for integration in Quark for publication.

    "Automatio
  • What, if any, applications, processes, etc. have you or your company put in place to increase productivity?

    Getting rid of Windows.

    DT

  • We put up a firewall rule that blocks access to Slashdot from the office. Productivity doubled.

    (Also, serious answer: When I started there, our twice-monthly invoices were generated in more-or-less random order. I wrote software that, wow, alphabetized them, to make them easier to file. Cost a ten-hours-per-week girl her job, but she was the only one upset about it. Everyone else loved me for it.)
  • This seems like a sales pitch to me. Which 100% guarantees I will never ever in a million years buy it. Nor will I ever encourage anyone to buy it. In fact, if I got to work at a company and they use it, I will be sure to bad mouth it at ever turn until I get them to switch to something else. So thanks for the sales pitch, it worked as planned.

  • My Career (Score:3, Informative)

    by kenp2002 ( 545495 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @01:45PM (#12479195) Homepage Journal
    I've been automating things for over 10 years. I've used QA testing packages, Winbatch, repackaging tools, ghost, all of it. My portfoli now stands at over a billion labor hours saved over 10 years. I've also been responsible for the layoff of over a thousand obsolete staff over 10 years.

    The most crucial thing to automate is tasks that tie up staff, something as simple as adding an automatic email at the end of a process can free up a tech from having to sit and watch "The Paint Dry".

    You can automate for speed but that is minor in the business world. A 5% saving in speed is easily eclipsed by increasing the install time by 10% but not having a tech needed (A 110% increase in 0% [the required tech time] is still 0%)

    Case Scenario from 2002:
    Small helpdesk of 6 members (at 40 hours a week so a total 240 labor hours a week).

    Target Activity: Image building. Requiring 80 labor hours for imaging and testing. (33% of available labor time)

    Subordinate Tasks: Staff also answer help desk calls.

    Current Work Load: 4 images over a month. Average 1 image a week.

    Reductions: Implemented several steps including using winbatch, msi, qa scripting, and prism to reduce imaging time to 30 minutes + 30 minutes of QA script validation.. Savings: 79 hours.

    Development Time: 1 month @ 40 hours a week.

    ROI: (Pay undisclosed) 5 months. And to this day they're still using the system. Recent tweaks allow for easier bulk re-imaging in the middle of the night and thanks to linux managing the boot process Windows XP machines can be queried to re-image themselves via a web page.

    Some solutions doesn't really speed anything up but just removes the need for a tech to be involved. That allows for those techs to be doing other activites. Over a year this type of labor savings doesn't usually result in a reduction in staff but does prevent staff growth. Other common tasks that can be report generation, patch and virus distrubtion, audit log collection, and file distribution. Currently the project I am working on is a weekly system-wide workstation re-imaging process to automatically re-image machines after 7 days for security and system maintenance. Expected labor savings are huge and will eliminate staff needing to come in on weekends.

    The most common starting point is asking the staff, "Do you ever get bored doing something?" That's where I start when looking for things to automate. Boring tasks usually take little in the way of brain power and are easy targets for automation. Not all redundant tasks can be automated but many can be. I found one location that had a staffer who's whole existence was to copy and past a value from an AS/400 screen to an excel spreadsheet. 15 minutes later and he was out of a job. The amount of waste in some companies is staggering. Good luck on the automation work, loads of fun.

    Excellent Toosl for Automation
    Winbatch (Pay close attention to the roboscript tool to speed things along)
    Winrunner or QA Wizard
    Perl (VERY POWERFUL TOOL, A MUST KNOW)
    Wise Package Studio
    Prism and Prism Deploy
    Know your MSI inside and out (Software installs are a massive waste of tech time.)
    PHP (for writing easy web pages to run everything. No process should be too complicated for a 10 year old child. You are after all automating things to make it easier, not harder.)

    Have Fun! Expect angry staffers though. Automation Enginneers (mechanical, procedural, or software) aren't the most well liked people. So far I've been lucky with only 14 death threats. I can't imagine how the mechanical engineers cope with it.

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