Operating a business in a digital world requires a commitment to efficiency and adaptability. What better way to run at peak efficiency and quickly adapt to changes than to reduce redundancy? Many daily operational tasks are repetitive, leading to wasted time, money, and labour. One Forbes article estimated that a Fortune 500 company could stand to save 4.7 million USD in a year by incorporating automation into their practice.
There are countless offerings for automating tasks, but the Python programming language stands above them all. Unlike Zapier or IFTTT, it is untethered to pre-established workflows and is almost endlessly customizable to your unique specifications. Here are just a handful of ways incorporating this programming can make your business run more efficiently.
Data processing
Even small businesses require and generate an extensive amount of raw data. An effective program will seamlessly turn this raw data into meaningful information. It will perform analyses creating accurate visualizations of how well your business is running or where to make improvements. Powerful data processing tools help you save money, increase productivity, and make reliable decisions, while not wasting your time.
Notification customisation
Business leaders and employees alike lose a lot of time reading and responding to emails. Most messages require personalised responses, but a programmer can write a script automatically sending emails containing reminders or repetitive information you would ordinarily copy and paste to different recipients.
If you have your computer running a task that will take some time, a customised program can send you a text notification or email to alert you when completed, meaning you need not be at your desk to complete the task. The applications are nearly endless.
Web scraping
Web scraping may sound like a scary term, but it’s quite the opposite. The right tools can turn raw internet data into deep insights on your industry. How?
A unique program can scour the internet, searching, downloading, and parsing relevant data that could otherwise take hours or even days for a human to do. This enables you to find data about competitor prices or monitor compliance with industry standards for equipment.
If clients are reviewing your products or services, a scraper can pull these reviews from a variety of locations regardless of the format and present it to you in a convenient configuration - allowing you to monitor your brand’s reputation among consumers.
Big Data processing
The information available for your business decision making is growing exponentially. Python is both flexible and scalable. It contains deep science libraries and libraries capable of supporting machine learning. It can support voice and image data, meaning you won’t be limited to only analyzing text files. It has operations to support unstructured data from social network systems.
The more data you can process, the more targeted your business decisions can be. These powerful tools allow you to keep abreast of trends affecting your organisation and help you stay ahead of the waves.
Image manipulation
You may find yourself in a situation requiring you or your employees to edit an enormous amount of images in a limited amount of time. Perhaps a company logo has changed and all internal documents must be updated to reflect the change. A program can access and edit thousands of images in a fraction of the time it would take a person to perform the same task, freeing them up for more urgent work.
Spreadsheets
The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, along with alternative spreadsheet software, offers powerful ways to work with data, but entering and changing that data can be repetitive and time-consuming. Save on time and effort by writing a program that can move, edit, or copy data from hundreds of spreadsheets.
A customised program can read, populate, and compare data across multiple spreadsheets. It could also create, update, and save new documents. It could standardize formatting through multiple documents, and it does not limit these capabilities to spreadsheet data.
Word and PDF files
PDF and Word documents can contain a wide range of information and metadata, making them very complicated to interact with. Often, even a simple copy-paste can lead to formatting errors and more time lost trying to correct them. Eliminate these problems by writing a program to create, open, and manipulate PDF or Word documents.
A simple program can open a PDF, rotate it, apply a watermark, extract and compile pages from multiple documents, or apply encryption. Read, modify or create a Word document incorporating different styles. There are nearly endless ways to use this programming language to meet your needs.
Timekeeping
You can create programs to automate easily forgotten tasks. For example, you may intend to run your web scraping software, but other projects get in the way. A personalised program can launch the s
