Time and money are huge value-adds to companies. It can, however, be difficult to reduce costs associated with time and money without reworking business processes. Workload automation provides a tool for businesses to implement and utilize, focused on creating more efficient processes.
The use of automation technology has many beneficial features. It reduces the need to employ more staff when scaling processes as well as saving time when onboarding new employees. Employees can shift to more value-added projects, maximizing their productivity, as redundant tasks are shifted away from them.
The concept of reworking your organization’s current business processes with workload automation is appealing. But, what are the best processes to automate? While it is tempting to automate everything, if you start with the wrong processes, then that may stall productivity, e.g., if the processes are too complex or analytics-driven. Finding the simplest, most repetitive processes can be key to a successful rollout.
Examining your business and processes is a great place to start when implementing workload automation. If you are interested in learning more about workload automation solutions from the PeerSpot real user community, check out our free report.
1) Data Warehouse Management
Workload automation can create an end-to-end approach for data warehouse processes: monitoring processes, auditing and logging extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, notifying users of errors/failures, and automating reporting. Automation of data warehouse processes can reduce the number of full-time employees (FTEs) that need to be hired for repetitive tasks. It also provides detailed visibility into reporting, which increases transparency and provides an audit trail.
Janice Scott, an Associate Dean of Enterprise Systems at a large educational institution, notes how OpCon has transformed their data warehouse processing for her organization’s data center, “We now run a dark data center. All of our processing is done at night without anybody there. The majority of our jobs are automated. We couldn't do without it.”
2) FTPs
File Transfer Protocols (FTPs) govern how computers transfer files from one system to another over the internet. Usually, FTPs require manual decluttering once they are transferred because it does not notify users of file delivery or failure. The benefits of utilizing workload automation software for FTPs is that the solution can schedule times or trigger events, monitor file transfers, log events, and notify you of delivery or failure. Also, automating FTPs reduces the time it takes to process them, such as restarting an event in case of failure.
Rob Grafrath, a Director of Enterprise System at a medium-sized financial services firm, discusses his FTP use case for JAMS, “Our primary use case is for file automation: detecting the presence of files, moving files from one system to another, doing FTP uploads, FTP downloads, and a large number of custom execution methods. Custom execution methods are a way to create your own code that extends the JAMS toolset.” He then goes on to explain the benefits and savings that his company has seen by implementing JAMS, “We have easily seen ROI. This is based on the fact that the number of jobs that we are running, the number of processes we have automated, and the number of new clients and processes that we've added since taking on JAMS without having to add staff has paid for itself in dividends.”
3) Auditable Processes
Leveraging a workload automation solution for auditable processes enhances the quality of reportable information. It minimizes data errors, eliminating human error in the process. For companies with quality goals or need to meet five nines (99.999%) availability, workload automation solutions can help achieve these goals and availability by allowing systems to work seamlessly together.
Peter Birksmith, a Senior System Analyst at a large insurance company, details why using ActiveBatch is critical for finance and auditing purposes at his organization, “We have some critical processes in ActiveBatch that go to finance and to the auditors in our organization. Those processes are highly critical because that allows us to trade. If those reports don't get to them, we get penalized by the government or by APRA or by some financial institutions. ActiveBatch, in this particular case, is absolutely critical for getting those reports out.”
4) IT Software Management
You may already have an IT Software Management (ITSM) solution installed in your organization. A workload automation tool integrated with your ITSM tool can enhance your level of visibility, providing you with alerts and reporting.
An AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm describes the impact that workload automation had on his company’s service-level operations after implementing Control-M. “It has helped us by improving our service-level operations performance. We've built integration between Control-M and our ITSM, which is ServiceNow, and that has certainly allowed us to gain more visibility within our community through ServiceNow. Every time a production job fails, an incident ticket is cut, and that's highly visible. That needs to be escalated too, and there is a much more defined process to be able to resolve that issue. In the past, obviously, when you didn't have that level of visibility or that integration, there was always time lost in identifying what the issue is.”
These are just some of the processes that can be automated using a workload automation solution. Check out more uses with PeerSpot’s free report on workload automation.
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