Automation is often thought of in terms of robotics and assembly lines. That’s certainly accurate, but anywhere a business is using humans for repetitive tasks such as data entry and information processing, there is an opportunity for automation.

On the shop floor, automation can be used for sorting, counting, packaging and manufacturing tems. This is an example of deploying capital hardware to automate production processes. But there is a lot of room for automation in the back office, as well; it can speed up writing checks, manually processing invoices and creating reports by hand, for example. Paper processes and extensive use of spreadsheets to move data around are all tasks that can be automated using a combination of software technologies.

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