Which system are you running a report from, importing it into excel, manipulating thousands of rows of data using formulas, to copy and paste the data into another system for data entry? Are you doing it again next month, next week, tomorrow?
Does your job happen at the same time every day, or multiple times a day? Is there some kind of triggering event like sending an email, saving a file into a directory, grabbing data from another system?
How much mapping do you have to do? Are the dates in your source the same as in your destination, or is one yyyy-MM-dd and the other is MM/dd/yyyy? Do you have rules, lookup tables, multi-level complicated allocations?
Who do you have to tell when you're done? Can they check for themselves? Can you check that the steps before you have to do yours have been completed?
Imagine...
That process you run every day kicks off automatically at 5am. It goes to your source system and queries the database directly. Or your source system has a scheduled report delivered by email. Or your source system is in the cloud and can only be accessed via web services.
Your data manipulation is automated. Mapping tables and lookup tables are available for editing on the web or via Excel - wherever you're more comfortable - and securable to only those people you want to have that power.
And those permissions integrate into your existing access directory system so you don't have to set users up all over again, just add them to the right group.
Once your data's all fixed up and ready to go, it gets automatically loaded into the destination system. Again, report file, upload a report to an FTP, push data to a web service. If you can wish it, it happens.
Oh no, there was a bad piece of info in the source data so the update failed. No worries, you got an email from the system to tell you what failed and why. And you didn't even have to pull out your manual because the error was translated from geek to English.
Or darn, there was a big power outage this morning and the system wasn't available when the kickoff should have happened. No biggie. You can log into the portal, find the failed job and kick it off once power is restored.
But most days, you come into the office and your reports and data integrations are done so instead of moving data around, you can analyze it instead. And not just this one piece of data, but all of them for every system you have.
If this all sounds like magic, call us your magicians.