Micro Harmonics

While Joel and his associates weren’t familiar with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), they were aware that automating some of their current tasks would allow them the freedom and flexibility to devote time towards laying the groundwork for each department they’d need. At this point Aaron Kees, the former chief financial officer of Micro Harmonics, recognized that his time was stretched too thin to even begin to tackle automation with scripting. While Aaron had found success in the past using scripting to automate his own work, he quickly realized creating and maintaining scripts for the rest of the company was not feasible. He recognized that for Micro Harmonics to scale as quickly as needed, people would have to be able to automate their own work by themselves.

Micro Harmonics had previously found the automation solutions they were looking for with KEYENCE, so when they began to investigate desktop automation, they found out about KEYENCE’s latest offering at the time: RK, a type of RPA with navigation features. Despite their unfamiliarity with RPA technology, they decided to explore the RK product through a demo to assess its suitability and potential specific to their needs.

After seeing a product demonstration of RK and getting a better understanding of its capabilities, it quickly became clear that not only would RK be capable of automating their processes, but it would also give Joel and Aaron their time back and allow Micro Harmonics to continue to grow. Aaron was looking to eventually leave Micro Harmonics to pursue other interests, and Joel needed to offload some of his current work to be able to take a more big-picture approach to developing a department structure for the company.

The goal of implementing RK was twofold at this juncture: automate Aaron’s processes so he can change paths without harming Micro Harmonics current operations, and automate Joel’s processes so he could dedicate more time to establishing the company structure. At first, the main application they had in mind was automating the generation of reports based on product test results. Due to the nature of Micro Harmonics’ business, they test each component after purchase before sending them to their customers and include the test results with each component. The task of creating this report associated with each sold component is directly tied to the company’s profitability; additionally, it’s not only critical for their business but also requires an in-depth understanding of each component being tested, limiting the number of people who can correctly complete this process.

Due to the complex nature of this process, Joel has maintained sole ownership of this process. According to Joel, this task is “too time consuming and too difficult to train someone else on,” and illustrated those past efforts to do so ultimately created more work for him with the myriad of questions that came with report generation. This task was also one of the main obstacles preventing Joel from dedicating more time to organizing the company structure, so upon purchasing RK automating this task was Joel’s top priority.

Now, several months after adopting RK, Aaron has comfortably left Micro Harmonics and Joel has been able to automate not only the component testing reports but is actively automating 14 different processes and tasks. These “scenarios” (automated workflows within RK) handle tasks that previously took from 20 minutes all the way up to several hours to complete. Some tasks are used on a daily or weekly basis, while other larger scenarios are used on a bi-weekly and monthly basis to handle the larger administrative tasks.

RK currently automates tasks for the Finance, Human Resources, and Operations groups. Micro Harmonics is using it to automate tasks that range from managing payroll within QuickBooks, to frequency testing reports in Excel, to monitoring stock levels in their inventory system. Prior to RK adoption, Joel was handling tasks in each category all on his own, but by implementing RK to automate the tasks he had previously taken on, he has been able to establish new independent owners of these processes. Removing managerial involvement in these processes had been Joel’s goal from day one, and accomplishing that with RK has presented the opportunity to begin laying down the groundwork for independent departments within the company.

“Sometimes RK makes a manual process automatic, and sometimes it just allows you to do something new.“

After Joel had the chance to weave RK into his everyday business operations, we were able to take a step back with him and review his journey with RK. Joel has successfully automated every high priority task he could recognize, so now he is working on building out the internal company structure and looking for additional opportunities for automation within the business as he understands the requirements for each department.

When asked about the benefits he’s seen since adopting RK, Joel said, “RK has been integral in allowing people to do work independently, which is better for the process, and then also frees up time for me…” which has given him the freedom to address the big picture issues he has been too busy to tackle. He also spoke very highly of our Customer Success team, saying “we did a lot of really fast development and those [onboarding] sessions were a great use of time.” Not only was Joel able to automate several tasks extremely quickly while learning to use the tool, but the accountability of the onboarding meetings helped him stay motivated to keep working towards his goals for automation.

“RK has been integral in allowing people to do work independently…“

By getting some automations successfully built out in the early days of RK’s implementation, Joel and the rest of Micro Harmonics were able to see how powerful and versatile it truly is. Even though Joel only had a couple ideas for RK applications in the early days of the implementation process, he still decided to try it out; this led to not only automating and offloading current processes but allowed him to implement new practices that could be entirely accomplished by RK to streamline Micro Harmonics’ business. When we asked Joel about the scope of Micro Harmonics’ use of RK, he simply said, “Sometimes RK makes a manual process automatic, and sometimes it just allows you to do something new.”

Now that Joel and Micro Harmonics have successfully tackled the most critical processes that were holding them up, Joel is excited for the future of RK within the company and is getting busy with developing the internal structure his company needs to continue to grow. Beyond the 14 automated processes they already have in place, Joel said he has roughly 5 more automated processes he would like to develop and that he “could be missing a great opportunity. I mean, I’m sure I am.” Luckily for Joel, as Micro Harmonics keeps growing and he finds those opportunities, he now has the knowledge and skill to automate anything he wants using RK.