The IT Pro Podcast: How to automate your business

Automation has been a trend in business for decades, but with the advent of cloud-powered low-code no-code tools, the benefits are now within reach of even the smallest organisations. Businesses are increasingly making use of the tools to reduce their reliance on paper processes, speed up manual tasks through intelligent workflows, and extract more value from their data.

In this episode, we hear from Paul McFarlane, CTO of Glasgow Credit Union, to find out how deploying business automation tools within the company’s lending business allowed it to achieve significant growth without increasing headcount, as well as offering faster loan approvals, and navigating the disruptions of COVID-19.

Highlights

“The pain points we had with deploying the process automation was we were not an IT focused business, we were not technically literate as a business; we had systems that had been in place for a long time. And we didn't have the capacity, or indeed the resources at the time, to start developing and start, you know, building interfaces and APIs that would sit in front of our existing back office. So we looked externally, and had to look externally to various different platforms, platforms like Laserfiche and Experian and different things that we could bring in to achieve some of those process automations.”

“The timeline for us was about three months. So we probably could have done that a lot quicker, the three month timeline was because we had to build a lot of front end stuff. So there's a lot of bespoke front end application forms and different things that we built. The actual business process automation, and configuring the workflows is really simplistic, and that can be deployed quite quickly. I'd suggest a number of days. If you weren't putting customised front ends on it to enable self-serving different things for customers. So ours was quite bespoke, which is what took the time.”

“There's been significant benefits as part of the process automation. It has helped us grow, which was the overall objective, and we've grown without any increase in headcount. It's not a revolution for the business, it's been an evolution over a period of years. And our headcount has more or less remained static for 12 years, despite the fact we've grown from £50 million to £200 million. And so I think that's quite an achievement. And we've achieved that through process automation.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• What is the paperless office?
• The IT Pro Podcast: Is it time to give up on the paperless office?
• How robotic automation is being applied to the workplace
• Almost three-quarters of businesses now use automation technologies
• Four business benefits of low-code
• Nurturing your business’ citizen developers
• The new generation of technologists

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