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Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

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Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#51

Post by kmartin »

hentrep wrote: post #10

I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.) Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.

Hi!

My name is Kaitlyn and I am with LogicGate. We will be able to help you streamline your process.

LogicGate is a flexible software solution, which empowers you to create highly controlled processes to automate and track your activities with new or existing vendors.

If you are currently using excel, emails and share drives to manage these activities, LogicGate can help automate, centralize and streamline your process.

Rather than shoehorning your process into expensive out-of-the-box software solution, or relying on Corporate IT, LogicGate enables you to take control of your risk thru a drag and drop interface.

I would love to show you a demo of our product. What is your direct contact information?

I look forward to connecting!

Kaitlyn Martin 414-517-9409 kaitlyn.martin@logicgate.com

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#52

Post by BjoernKW »

jasikpark wrote: post #35

Cleaning up and organizing data for processing.

Can you elaborate?

There are plenty of data cleansing and processing tools. Things like formatting errors can easily be fixed automatically. Things like "Human erroneously put a string in a date field in Excel and exported it to CSV."? Not so much. Errors like that often require bespoke solutions.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#53

Post by thedonkeycometh »

Pica_soO wrote: post #49

Robotics & PLC Programing: Automate DEA state creation from CAD-Cell Descriptions, state-transfers and all-state-covered-automated-proofing- im so sick of all those forgotten states and the blame that usually gets shifted towards the moving actors aka robots.

I've recently got into robotics, can you explain what you mean?

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#54

Post by mbrookes »

robodale wrote: post #14
hentrep wrote: post #10

I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.) Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.

hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: hn@robodale.33mail.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)

You guys realise that mailinator is public? Dale, I can see your email address.

I highly recommend 33mail.com instead - it has a pretty generous free tier: http://33mail.com/rj37w3.

(Not associated, just a long-time user and happy paying customer.)

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#55

Post by btown »

rch wrote: post #38

Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants. Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.

The real problem with phone screens is that unless you (as a recruiter) trust an unbiased third party to do phone screens at the level of rigor that you would do them yourself (rather than being incentivized, as recruiting agencies often are, to try to maximize the number of candidates they give to you), you have to do phone screens yourself with every candidate, requiring NM conversations. If you do solve that problem of trust, then you just need K(N+M) conversations, where each recruiter and each candidate establishes a relationship with one of K third parties, wherein the recruiter is notified about the candidate iff the candidate passes the third party's screens. https://triplebyte.com/ is trying to be such a third party, establishing trust with YC alumni; there are likely others. From a friend going through the process as a candidate, it seems that they have a high level of rigor and are placing him in good later-stage interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#56

Post by blakesterz »

Onboarding of new customers. I feel like we must do this different than most places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be "good enough" so far (support has been perfect though). I feel like a bunch of this should be able to be automated with something that already exists.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#57

Post by nurettin »

skyyler wrote: post #9

I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf, taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow

Neccessity is the mother of invention. Do you have a need to distribute your job queues to multiple servers? Do you need multi-master db replication? Do you load balance? Do you need to instantiate db backups to recover/inspect data? Do you backup snapshots of every server? The more these things happen, the more likely is your IT to yield and buy rack servers

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#58

Post by kylixz »

As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#59

Post by btown »

beat wrote: post #39

A related question, for my own interests... how able do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools? As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools t…

It's generic advice, but: Make sure you're solving the manager's pain point, not the low-level employee's (i.e. "this gets the information/service to you with a higher guarantee of quality and always at your fingertips" rather than "this saves your employee a lot of stress"), and make sure you're marketing to the manager, not just the low-level employee. And if you get lower-level employees as leads, make sure they have the ammunition (white papers, etc.) so they can escalate to their managers in terms of solving their managers' pain points.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#60

Post by beachstartup »

BjoernKW wrote: post #45
Johnny555 wrote: post #18

I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is?

there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices.

the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember?

you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.

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