[GALA Valencia 2024] Case Study & Challenge: Automate your company in 4 months on a shoe-string budget

For smaller LSP companies, each new client, each new task is also a new challenge. One that demands more resources, more money, more people to be involved. None of which we can afford. The limited budget, the price-pressure from our clients, an ever-increasing workload of small projects, and finally the number of very similar yet repetitive administrative tasks and manual processes are becoming unbearable. Or just down-right annoying. Let’s change that for good! So much time is wasted just on data entry, invoicing, and procedures that are all different from one company to another. It’s driving us crazy. I will be targeting different levels of hands-off automation in the company, and document a 4-month period from November ’23 to the end of February ’24 trying to automate the un-automatable. Think clients with no API: from data entry, projects setup, project acceptance and denial, etc. to invoicing procedures in several BMS systems, including upload, download, all the dreadful clicks. And most probably a ton of other strange and new tasks that will come up during this period.

But that's not all... It's easy to do it when "you spend money, to make money". But the twist is to do it with a budget of no more than a $100 of extra cost a month! In the session I will share the challenges and the solutions, the thinking, processes, findings, tools, and of course, both successes and failures of this journey. I will present real data (NDA and privacy might need some data to be changed or anonymized) and will try to go to practical advice on how this can be or cannot be done. The most important question would be: should we do it at all? Get ideas from my findings and save yourself and your company a two-weeks’ vacation amount of time per year. Or pity me for my failure :)

Host organization: Globalization and Localization Association