My employer struggled with creating reliable and efficient processes using Blue Prism's automation tool for over a year. They had a full pipeline, yet no processes in production, I was tasked to help them with automating processes. Each process was vastly different, consisting of different types of applications each servicing different departments.

Result: I automated 8 processes, saving the company 5 FTE over a span of 15 weeks by combining my knowledge of Blue Prism, Excel and JavaScript. Apart from the automation I also successfully wrote a thesis regarding process prioritization in RPA, outlining the monetary benefits of proper prioritization.

Each year my employer struggled to update last year's annual report with the current year's numbers. All the financial statements and notes were edited manually in word, introducing errors and irregularities. The whole process of updating and checking the annual report was extremely time consuming.

Result: In excel multi-layered calculation and visualisation sheets were built. The sole required input was the trial balance for each entity. This data was categorised and then used in calculations. All formulas were already in place, so it would balance out correctly. It also provided a historical view using data from prior years. The generated tables would be linked to the word file, which updated automatically. Only the text had to be updated in word and the annual report was finished.

My client was responsible for filing corporate tax returns for his clients. Many of these clients had multiple entities for which tax returns needed to be filed, some of them had over 100 separate entities. The data for these entities was listed in a single Excel sheet, but had to be separated into individual sheets. This task took many hours to complete per client, dramatically increasing the costs for their clients.

Result: A VBA macro was made which moved to data to individual sheets and filtered the data as to only keep the necessary information. This saved my client many hours in manual data-entry.

As part of the robotic process automation project, my employer wanted to automate the reconciliation of credit card payments and online reservations. In this reconciliation, payment logs provided by the payment platform(s) were compared to their own payment logs. This task took them about 24 hours per day across the entire business.

Result: A VBA macro was created which reconciled the payment logs in a couple of seconds when provided with the data from each system. The reconciliation was consistently extremely accurate, needing very limited human adjustments. As part of the robotic process automation, the retrieval of payment logs and running of the macro had also been automated.

My employer spent a lot of time each month sending employee's emails containing information regarding their paid time off. Each month employee's got an overview of how many days they had left, when they used and could use their paid time off. Each employee had an individual sheet where these records were kept. The sheets were converted to pdf files and sent to each employee, with a message which differed per country of residence.

Result: Several VBA macro's were created which exported the PTO sheets as PDF files individually or in bulk. The macro could also instantly create a draft email with the PDF attached for each individual employee, the emails could then be sent by the HR department after being checked.

In order to create certain payroll journals in the ERP system, my employer needed to upload an excel file containing each journal. These journals contained a large amount of repetitive data and were created manually. These journals often had inconsistencies due to human errors introduced while manually creating the journals.

Result: I created a form in which a minimal amount of data needed to be entered and by referencing and duplicating data, it generated multiple journal entries. This massively reduced the time required and erros introduced in the payroll journal creation.

My employer had multiple employees working based on a 0-hour contract. Each employee had to register their hours in an excel sheet and send their hours to their manager for approval, who then forwarded the hours to the payroll department. Since each employee recorded their hours differently and wasn't always on-time for the payroll run, a standardized sheet needed to be created.

Result: I created a sheet which required minimal input from the employee to track their hours, but provided a good overview for their managers and payroll. The sheet included a calendar view, a week view and a section to indicate when an employee was available to work. Alongside this sheet a Microsoft flow was made which could automatically send the sheet for approval just on time for the payroll run. Eventually I also created an app (for desktop and mobile use) to record and submit worked hours via Microsoft PowerApps.

Over the years I've come across many simple reformatting and dashboard projects. Such as creating a button to quickly reformat a bank statement so it can directly be uploaded to the company's ERP system. Small projects like these can be large time-savers when used frequently.