Can reminders and follow-ups be automated?
Efficiency question :
There are several ways to automate reminders and follow-ups. Microsoft Excel, for example, can easily manage time, including hours, minutes, seconds and dates. It can also calculate differences between dates and apply precise rules to trigger reminders automatically.
A follow-up can therefore be generated from a date entered by the user or from a calculation rule, for example a few days after an order, activity or intervention. Other technologies can also be used, including Outlook and Copilot agents, which provide increasingly powerful options for conducting searches, triggering actions and facilitating follow-ups.
Key considerations:
Before automating reminders, you need to determine precisely what type of follow-up is required and which rules should apply. Holidays, business days and exceptions that may change a reminder date must be considered. The clearer the rules, the more reliable the automation will be.
Challenges:
The main challenge is to clearly identify the need and the conditions that determine when a reminder should be triggered. When the user can clearly explain the process, the rules required for automation are generally fairly straightforward to establish.
You must also determine how the reminder should be delivered: displayed in a file, sent by email, created as an Outlook task, issued as a notification or handled through another follow-up mechanism.
Technology:
Microsoft technologies provide several ways to automate reminders and follow-ups. Excel can manage dates and perform the necessary calculations, while Outlook can manage tasks, deadlines and notifications.
Depending on the need, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) can also automate actions directly in Excel. Copilot agents are adding new capabilities for searching information, performing actions and managing certain follow-ups more autonomously.
Developer's advice:
The Management Reports course available on demand through the SLV Expert training portal includes a section on time management and formulas for working with dates.
In Excel, functions such as DATEDIF and WEEKDAY, combined with mathematical operations on dates, can be used to build many follow-up rules. When the process becomes more complex, VBA can also automate reminder triggers and the actions that follow.
We also recommend SLV Expert’s Copilot training and the Create and Deploy Your First Copilot Agent course. These courses show how Copilot and agents can be used to automate tasks, conduct searches, trigger actions and facilitate reminders and follow-ups.