A robot for a vendor portal
- 45–60 ssaved on every portal entry
- 4–13 hrssaved a day at this client's 300–800 requests
- 3,279backlogged requests cleared
The problem
A car rental business has to update every trip request on a large customer’s vendor portal before it can be billed: 300–800 new requests a day, one form at a time. The portal has no API, and a backlog of more than 3,000 requests had built up.
What I delivered
A browser robot that runs in the cloud every day. It logs in, works through every pending request, fills and submits each form, and emails a summary. A backlog mode cleared weeks of pending work, and a watchdog restarts the run if it ever gets stuck.
The result
At 45–60 seconds per entry, the robot has saved the team roughly 4–13 hours of form-filling a day. It cleared the 3,279-request backlog and runs for under $5 a month in hosting.
How it's built
From input to result
- Scheduler starts the robot daily
- Robot logs into the portal
- Each pending entry filled and submitted
- Watchdog checks the run
- Summary email
Built with
- Headless browser automation
- Python
- Google Cloud VM
- Cloud Scheduler
- Email alerts
Engineering decisions
- The portal has no API, so the robot works the screens exactly as a person would.
- A watchdog restarts a stuck run, and alert emails flag anything that needs a human.
- The server starts only for the run and shuts itself down, so hosting costs under $5 a month.