Process Automation

A candidate for automation is a process that one or two people know how to run and nobody has written down. When those people are out, the month-end export or the renewal emails wait for them. Hiring more staff adds cost and still leaves the knowledge in a few heads.

Processes IKRC can automate include:

• scheduled data loads and cleanup between an operational database and a reporting database
• generated documents such as statements, quotes and letters
• notification and follow-up emails triggered by a record changing state
• small custom screens or APIs that feed an existing system that has no import

An automated job needs a record of every run that someone other than the developer can read. SQL Server Agent is one scheduler for this kind of work, and it keeps a limited job history: on Azure SQL Managed Instance the limit is fixed at 1,000 rows in total and 100 per job, with the oldest rows removed first. A job that runs every few minutes can push last week's failure out of that history. Writing each run, its row counts and its errors to an application table keeps that history for as long as the business needs it.

For multi-step approvals and hand-offs between people, see Workflow.