How did web automation help a self-described “chief cook and bottle washer” spend a lot less time on repetitive tasks?
Alberto Voli’s Arizona-based company is Zgrum Medical, a buyer, seller and servicer of pre-owned medical equipment. It’s a successful firm, but not a very big one in terms of staff. That means every minute counts.
Alberto and his team were spending way too much time logging into web apps, filling out forms, uploading and downloading files, and extracting data. This kind of copying and pasting data between files and web forms doesn’t bring the kind of productivity that can help grow a small business.
As Alberto puts it, “It is critical to me to free my team’s brainpower so they can get their jobs done. I don’t want them wasting time on mundane repetitive tasks and making errors along the way.”
Alberto needed a web automation tool to automate simple business processes and selected Ipswitch iMacros. He is not a programmer so iMacros was a good fit because it doesn't require creating scripts to automate tasks.
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“With iMacros, a simple mouse click lets me record a browser session and create a script right out of the box, with no learning curve.” - Alberto Voli, Zgrum Medical
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iMacros records the number of mouse clicks and keystrokes within a browser session and automatically converts that into scripts that can be used to automate business processes. iMacros can also import or export data to and from web applications using CSV & XML files, databases, or any other source.
Automating Financial Transactions
Zgrum has several bank accounts for transacting their business deals. Each day, they transfer funds from their secondary accounts to their primary account. Doing this manually took a full half hour. With iMacros the process is now fully automated and pre-scheduled.
“Press the iMacros button, go grab a cup of coffee and when you come back the job is done.” – Alberto Voli, Zgrum Medical
Alberto needs to reconcile his bank transactions with his database on a monthly basis. This used to require copying and pasting each and every bank and credit card transactions. With iMacros, Alberto created an automated job to download these transactions and streamline the reconciliation process with a single press of a button.
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Alberto also has to go to the Arizona state website monthly to process payroll and other business taxes. The website doesn’t let him copy and paste his banking account information so he had to do it manually. With iMacros he automated the process to enter his financials into the website, which also helped to avoid errors.
Automating Shipping and Receiving
Zgrum uses major carriers to ship and receive medical equipment. It took one person about one hour to copy and paste shipping and receiving information into online forms. This had to be done up to ten times a day. With iMacros in place, Alberto’s employees can automatically extract shipping information from their database and populate into online shipping forms.
In all, Alberto has over 30 iMacros web automation jobs supporting his business operations. These have all drastically cut the amount of time it takes to conduct tedious yet important tasks so Alberto can focus on his business, and not the day-to-day tasks that can slow it down.