Not so long ago it would’ve been mind-blowing to think you could execute and coordinate every single IT and business process right across the enterprise – regardless of systems, departments, applications and geographies – using

More and more organizations automate processes to save time and money and to improve control, business intelligence (BI) and services. Many of them also plan to benefit from even more cost-savings and flexibility by using a cloud automation service.

However, some companies still have concerns about the migration to cloud, seeing security as the main of several barriers to cloud migration. Here are five ways you can end these cloud migration worries:

The Enterprise Process Automation™ approach to migrate from on-premises to the cloud

1. Choose a solution that has always been web-enabled. The best solutions have always been at home with the cloud.
2. Choose a service that doesn’t move your data or applications. That way you have no security issues with either. The automation alone should run in the cloud.
3. Adapt to your existing infrastructure. It’s about getting value from what you already have—not replacing everything. Cloud automation should work with what you’ve got.
4. Support the good processes you already have in place. Cloud automation should help by alleviating administrative burdens and supporting your good practices.
5. Use a pay-as-you-go model for your cloud automation. That way it’s completely flexible and adaptable to your needs. You only pay for what you use – no more, no less. You can also easily scale up or down depending on your changing business requirement. Manageable costs and flexibility are big winners for cloud services.

Making the transformation to cloud-based automation is one of the most important and empowering steps you can take to improve your enterprise and your business results. To find out more, check out this RunMyJobs video on how automation from the cloud can work for you.

The post Cloud Migration: Pigs Really Can Fly appeared first on Redwood Software.

Customer service needn't be a burden - automate manual processes

As the Arabic proverb implies: everyone has their breaking point.  Recently, four thousand consumers in the UK and US have explained where and when they reach theirs—and businesses need to pay attention.  A new survey commissioned by Redwood discovered that customers are abandoning purchases, switching suppliers and terminating contracts because they’re not experiencing the smooth integration they expect from brands that have both an on- and off-line presence. Customers expect more from the “bricks and clicks” brands they know. But instead, they often have to deal with shoddy services, redundant questions and disconnected processes.

Customer service survey results – US and UK

More than ever, choosy customers expect companies’ digital and physical storefronts to be integrated, delivering a fast, seamless end-to-end experience. Waiting for a sales assistant to check stock room inventory physically made almost half (45%) of all respondents furious. An assistant’s inability to tell a shopper whether a desired item was in-stock online or in another store was also a big frustration (38% of respondents).

When asked about shopping habits, a massive 83% of UK  and 76% of US shoppers left stores — and 72.5% (UK) and 65% (US) left online marketplaces — because they weren’t easily able to find what they were looking for. Other significant in-store and online shopping annoyances include:

• Going to a store to purchase something, only to discover that that item was out of stock (52% in the UK; 46% in the US). In the UK, 37.3% were similarly annoyed when the same thing happened with online purchases. US consumers expressed slightly less annoyance, with 36% frustrated by this.

• The hassle of returning unwanted purchases online (57% in the UK; 49% in the US)
• The hassle of returning unwanted purchases in-store (33% in the UK; 37% in the US)
• Experiencing a delay in money being returned to a shopper’s account following a return (47% in the UK; 52% in the US)
• Not receiving acknowledgement from a company that a returned item was received (39% in the UK; 38% in the US)

And actual customer service desks – that are set up specifically to deal with these kinds of problems – also came under fire. 55% of UK and 62% of US respondents reported annoyance at having to complete an automated telephone system by entering their personal information, only to be asked the same or more questions by an operator. Similarly, 55% (UK) and 59% (US) were annoyed when repeating information to multiple people or departments across transfers.

According to the survey, stakes are high for brands to start delivering streamlined and efficient end-to-end service to their consumers. Two thirds of UK consumers and nearly half of US consumers said they had terminated online purchases because they took too long (66% in the UK and 49% in the US) or were too complicated (61% in the UK; 48% in the US). More worryingly for brands, more than half of respondents (58% in the UK and 52% in the US) have terminated contracts or changed suppliers because of continued service failings.

The big little problems

It’s often the little problems that cause the biggest issues. And it’s surprising how many businesses are still ignoring these little disconnected things that, all together, are breaking their customers’ backs and losing them business. With customer loyalty dead and brand reputation critical, it is imperative that business can supply a satisfactory and speedy service. Businesses need to provide a seamless customer experience, from pre-sale to billing.

Process Automation Helps Ease the Customer Service Burden

Process automation can help businesses achieve efficiency and cost savings, and essentially deliver customer satisfaction.  Businesses can’t afford to keep losing customers—they need to be doing everything within their power to keep them engaged and spending. Any barriers preventing this need to be eliminated – and quickly.

Check out these infographics for a breakdown of the research findings for both the US and UK

*In March 2013, 2,000 UK and 2,000 US consumers were surveyed by OnePoll about their real-life and virtual interactions with retailers, service providers and financial organisations.

The post Customer Service Frustration: the Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back appeared first on Redwood Software.

Process coordination - at the heart of business control

Every business runs on processes. If you’re still in business, the odds are that many of your IT and business processes are already automated. But what about the business-critical processes that span departments, geographies, systems and applications? Are they connected and coordinated? Are they still managed manually? Disorganized, unconnected manual processes slow companies down and lose them money. Redwood’s Enterprise Process Automation platform can put an end to poor process coordination and grim stories like these.

Manual processes  and process coordination – where it goes wrong

Every single day, slow manual processes and poor, unautomated process coordination lead to these scenarios:

1. Overnight/weekend background processing gradually eats into working business hours, leaving staff’s PCs with slow response times. Customer service suffers.
2. Staff become bored, frustrated or restless and make a critical error with serious repercussions on the business.
3. There is a change in the market. The business can’t respond as quickly as competitors can because senior management is still waiting for the relevant business and finance reports from across the business.

And there’s more:

4. You can’t identify where a product is in the supply chain. You don’t know stock levels in various stores at any given time. Potential sales are missed and other customers are left waiting for products without any true indication of when they might expect delivery.

5. Compliance demands are not met and the business suffers unwelcome fines.

6. You don’t know the state of your finances on a daily basis. It can take weeks to gather and process financial data. Your financial close is a mess and monthly surprises are the norm.

Real company experiences before automation

These are all scenarios that organizations have experienced before they implemented Redwood’s Enterprise Process Automation platform. When we discussed Shell’s situation before automation, this is what their IT Project Manager Jeroen Hollema had to say: “Closing data was scattered across spread sheets and third-party software. It was impossible to get a single, global view into what was happening – and harder to arrive at an accurate, company-wide financial close.”

Similarly, when it came to compliance issues and overnight processing, Dave Carney, enterprise infrastructure analyst at Virgin Money was pessimistic. He said: “A change in financial regulations can mean up to 800 changes in our IT system. These changes would have to be made overnight, which often meant that getting the overnight processing to complete would be an impossible task.”

Regarding their supply chain, Clare Joel, development manager at French Connection, the global fashion retailer and wholesaler said: “Our stock replenishment process had to interact intelligently with SAP® and we needed to automate this critical process more fully. Our retail store operations are entirely reliant on having the right products available for our customers at the point of sale, and we needed a faster and more reliable process to ensure this.”

Yet until a few years ago they had no choice in the matter. End-to-end enterprise process automation didn’t exist. Now, however, you can connect every last business and IT process right across the business – even including suppliers and business partners – so you get a single view of the business in real time. And if you have a smart solution, you can access this from either a business or an IT view. Slow manual processes are gone and along with it a good measure of business risk and bored staff – who are now free to provide real value to the business.

Enterprise Process Automation – Know Your Business

Once your organization is connected and coordinated you can really get under the skin of your business and benefit from:

-          Flexibility

-          Control

-          Fast processing

-          Saved time and money

-          Better customer and partner services

-          Improved compliance

-          Diminished business risk

I expect that in our economic climate there are very few businesses that can afford not to automate. Hans Jansen, Senior SAP Basis Specialist at Epson Europe said: “We saved 10.5 working days every quarter when our specialist could work on other projects. I really wonder how other enterprise businesses can manage without it.”

If you want to hear more stories from companies across the globe on how Redwood Enterprise Process Automation changed their business you can check out this video.

The post 6 Signs that Poor Process Coordination is Harming your Business appeared first on Redwood Software.

Control your IT and business processes with Enterprise Process Automation

In the IT and business process automation universe, it’s no bad thing to be a bit of a control freak.   Controlling critical processes through automation and coordination across departments, geographies and systems – and even across global partner and supplier networks – will help reduce business risk while at the same time increasing consistency, efficiency and productivity.

Simply following three simple steps from Enterprise Process Automation™ methodology should de-stress even the biggest control freak.

How to automate in 3 simple steps

1. Identify your processes

During the initial phases of establishing the Redwood Enterprise Process Automation platform in a business, it is not uncommon for organizations to be unable to identify many of their own business processes. Instead of being documented and accessible, the knowledge behind many processes resides only in single individuals’ heads. So, what if those individuals don’t turn up to work one day? Do their business-critical processes grind to a halt? What would be the impact on the business? Smart companies take action now so that this situation never happens.

In the discovery phase with one of our customers who needed to automate their global financial close, we discovered that 30% of the tasks around their close process were undocumented. This opened the door for many opportunities for risk – not just because of the slow, inconsistent manual tasks – but also because they didn’t know what was really going on in their company every day.

The good news is that we were able to help them identify every single process. Together, we worked to successfully automate their entire financial close process—avoiding any crises along the way.

2. Automate business-critical processes first

Once you have a record of all existing processes, the next step is to identify the ones that are the critical processes that promise immediate results from automation. These vary from industry to industry and business to business, but often include financial close processes as mentioned above, supply chain processes and system copy processes. These are all areas which, if overlooked, can cause chaos in a business.

How?

A slow or inaccurate financial close can leave a company behind the competition or in trouble with regulators. Poorly controlled supply chains can lead to business-breaking delays and losses. Not conducting regular system copy updates can leave a business exposed to old security systems and viral attacks, which have cost organizations thousands and millions in revenue.

Working with an industry expert to identify which processes are critical for your specific industry will help steer your business on the right path.

3. Start small and build success as you go

The Enterprise Process Automation approach is designed to start small and then expand to suit your requirements and resources. You don’t have to automate everything in your business at once. Start with your most critical areas—or just select one process area to begin with—and build progress until every process you want is automated, end-to-end.

To find out how you can build a specific plan for your business so you have better control, dramatically increased efficiency and a significant competitive advantage, download the first white paper in a three-part series, entitled: Redwood’s Enterprise Process Automation Maturity Model

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The post Enterprise Process Automation: the panacea for the control freak appeared first on Redwood Software.

Automation: The Rise of the People

New roles emerge in the era of Enterprise Process Automation

Of all the external forces that will affect companies over the next three to five years, CEOs now see technology change as the most critical. Cloud computing and the consumerization of IT are at the top of the list of reasons why.  When you combine these changes with heightened customer service demands and greater end-user expectations, you can see how businesses now face a perfect storm.

Tempting as it may be to recruit more people to deal with all this, just having more hands on deck isn’t the answer. More manual work means more manual error. But automation doesn’t mean that robots will take over the world. On the contrary, you will need people in the workplace—the right people— doing more strategic activities to meet and exceed your goals.

In the current business environment it’s crucial to automate processes—especially for repeated, critical business processes. That way you can ensure the accuracy, speed, efficiency, consistency and quality you need every time. Activities such as payroll, billing, supply chain and system copy must be first on the list to automate.

When you automate these processes you get:

• Faster, reliable, standardized and cost-effective process execution
• Fewer errors
• Rapid flexibility
• Lower process cost
• Highly skilled and knowledgeable staff freed from repetitive, mundane tasks and refocused on more strategic activities

Adapt and thrive

That’s right. Automation makes your workers more valuable and more strategic. With it your employees get to ditch the grunt work and focus on their real skills. They don’t just need to work anymore. They need to work smarter.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (as stated in Control Engineering magazine), the talent needed for process-focused automation in the U.S. manufacturing industry alone is expected to grow six percent from 2010 to 2020.

With the present and predicted rise in enterprise process automation, Forrester’s Stephen Mann expects us to see new roles being created such as:

• Business relationship manager
• Automation architect
• Service designer
• Service manager
• Vendor manager
• Process owners

Remember Bill Gates’ comment: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.” There’s no question that automation isn’t just good for business. It’s good for people, too.

Check out our new two-minute video to see how organizations like Shell, French Connection and UBS are benefitting from enterprise process automation

The post Automation: The Rise of the People appeared first on Redwood Software.

“Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.”

(from “What is big data?”)

The Challenge

This kind of growth creates lots of challenges. Of course, big data can be tough to deal with, but it’s also full of opportunities and critical clues to help you build your business. Who are your best customers? Big data has the answer. Where do you generate the most revenue? Big data can show you. What needs improvement? Big data can lead the way. Big data is everywhere, and the private sector alone generates huge volumes of big data continually. Companies use it to keep track of almost every activity they do.

According to Wikipedia:

“-    Walmart handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, which is imported into databases estimated to contain more than 2.5 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 167 times the information contained in all the books in the US Library of Congress.

-    FICO Falcon Credit Card Fraud Detection System protects 2.1 billion active accounts world-wide.

-     The volume of business data worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years, according to estimates.”

And that’s just a few examples. It’s clear in all of this that organizations have to find an effective, efficient and fast way to deal with all of this information. But how? How can a mere mortal handle the vast, dizzying, yet clearly important volume of data that business generates these days?

Automate for Answers

Start by examining the processes that generate all that big data. At their core, business and IT processes are a series of related, dependent tasks that must be completed in a logical sequence, but their real value lies in their completion and outcome. When you begin to optimize and automate processes as a whole, you start implementing enterprise process automation.

Enterprise process automation has real value for big data—because—just like big data–it crosses silos of departments, technologies and locations. It can help you bring all your big data together—and back down to size.  Enterprise process automation also gives you the benefits of complete control without the need to micromanage every step of every process—or all of the billions of pieces of big data that come in. It’s a smart way to use technology to your best business advantage.

Back to Human Scale

Information technology (IT) has always been about taking large volumes of data and bringing it back to human scale. Without serious IT power, even an everyday weather forecast—something we all take for granted—wouldn’t be possible. IT and business leaders should use this same managed approach to get their big data back down to business.

Right now, enterprise process automation is the way smart businesses cope with expansion and growing markets. It’s how leaders flip complexity around and transform high volume activity from a burden to a benefit. Enterprise process automation can help you get the most from big data, too. There’s no question that Redwood’s holistic approach is the right way for you to automate processes to make big sense—and big money—from your big data.

The post Make Sense of Big Data appeared first on Redwood Software.

Clearly, cloud services have big benefits. Companies don’t have to worry about building additional infrastructure to support them. Applications and platforms delivered through the cloud are updated automatically and keep business moving forward. Cloud services can also be delivered on an “as needed” basis, too, aligning costs of operation with actual use.

Here at Redwood we’ve helped our customers automate cloud services and virtualised resources on a regular basis. We’ve helped customers automate processes that include cloud resources connecting applications, storage and platforms. But what would happen if we took the automation engine itself and offered it as a service delivered through the cloud?

That’s when RunMyJobs—the only process automation service delivered through the cloud—was born. Most cloud technologies base their benefits on availability (access anywhere, anytime) and the elimination of licensing fees or hardware expenses. Automation through the cloud offers all of this, too.  However, RunMyJobs offers customers even more. It does something unique. As an automation service provided via the cloud, it enables customers to both apply and control process automation anywhere, anytime. This is a game-changer for cloud services and automation.

Now, companies can apply and control process automation easily and quickly throughout their enterprise (and even outside of the four walls of their traditional enterprise). Rather than just accessing applications, infrastructure or data, business and IT professionals can now build in automation that is easy to implement, change and expand. Since it’s provided as a service without having to install and maintain a large software footprint– just small, low impact agents–RunMyJobs makes process automation much simpler to manage and use.

According to a recent report by Forrester analyst James Staten, “The whole value of cloud computing is tied to areas of IT that can be standardized, automated, and shared among multiple constituents.” It’s obvious that automation itself is a great place to use the cloud for maximum value. Have a look at www.runmyjobs.com to find out more.

The post Why Automation in the Cloud? appeared first on Redwood Software.

As a significant contributor and cost center in the business, IT has been under intense scrutiny over the past decade (at least) to streamline, reduce costs and give the business the edge it needs to accomplish more—faster and with fewer resources. I’ve seen the transformation among our clients firsthand.

I would argue that “business and IT convergence” drives most IT projects I encounter these days. Whether its efforts to reduce complexity, standardize processes or simply improve processes so that they happen faster, more accurately or more transparently, companies everywhere are working to get the most from their IT investments and use IT to enable competitive advantage.

Our most successful customers understand that the first steps in enabling an agile and optimized enterprise are orchestration and automation.

Most companies start out with extremely heterogeneous IT environments that support isolated business units. Bits and pieces of software and disparate platforms support segregated processes. When processes need to be connected or compared, it takes manual effort, custom programming or other extreme measures to orchestrate activities. This is expensive and painful.

Similarly, automation often exists only in certain, isolated areas where IT supports a particular business process. Once that process is complete, it often takes manual effort once again to bring its results into the bigger picture.

When IT and business come together to streamline processes and align their goals, it can be like turning over a rock to see the creeping crawlers that have been living just out of sight.  It can be a shock to see the countless inefficient and disconnected processes that bog down business and add to the cost of IT.

It becomes painfully apparent that—somehow—both business and IT leaders have to find a way to function without all of that manual intervention.  After all, isn’t IT supposed to make things work faster and easier? How do you make that happen?

The answer lies in enterprise process automation. It’s a new way to look at automation from a logical, business perspective.  With it you can start small—wherever it would have the greatest impact—and then build out automation in a connected way so that your IT and business goals are always aligned.

The post Wake Up and Smell the Convergence appeared first on Redwood Software.

Of course system copy is a necessary process; SAP recommends that enterprises perform system copies to create test, demo and training systems. The process is also required for migration, disaster recovery, and when a company changes its operating system or database. But research shows that doing it manually is costly and inefficient.

The research, carried out by IZEN Marketing on behalf of Redwood Software, found that, based on an average employee’s daily working wage[i], most enterprises lose around $81,000 per year performing system copy manually[ii]. Organizations that invest particularly large amounts of human resources to the exercise could lose up to a staggering $942,000 annually.

The research reveals:

• 92 percent of respondents use at least five employees to run system copy manually, with some using 20 people or more to undertake this critical task
• 61 percent of those surveyed said it takes five days to run the process manually, and 35 percent said it takes even longer
• 56 percent of the companies surveyed run system copy quarterly, with a full 25 percent  of the respondents only running the process once every six months

Now it’s time for the good news. Companies don’t have to pay so much or expend this much manual effort on system copy. Many have found a way to reduce it while keeping service quality high and risk low. They automate the system copy process from end-to-end. And we’ve shown them how.

To find out more about SAP system copy automation, check out this short video on our RunMyJobs SAP System Copy APP.

The post Survey reveals the shocking cost of manual SAP® system copy appeared first on Redwood Software.

Most people understand that when they rely on manual intervention for critical process tasks—like credit card processing or inventory adjustments—they open these core processes to the damaging effects of human error every time they run. These processes are also full of repetitive, boring steps that can take time and don’t add value if they’re done manually. When people apply automation to these processes, IT and business leaders see almost immediate benefit from more controlled, better and faster processes. That’s a real improvement.

Often, however, processes that involve backups, archiving and other IT housekeeping tasks aren’t integrated into this automation picture. As a result, many enterprises rely on a patchwork of different tools outside of what they consider to be their “core process automation” to do this vitally important work. These tasks are managed in a different silo. That’s because people tend to think of backups, archiving or other IT housekeeping work as separate from critical business processes. The fact is that it’s just not true.

Backups and archiving tasks—by definition—rely on the completion of a cycle or a time frame to begin. These “housekeeping” tasks are inextricably connected to the processes they support. They should only run at the right time or situation in relation to those processes. So why not make the backup, archiving or other standard procedures an integrated and automated part of the same process? That would be an even greater improvement.

Companies that integrate these tasks along with the processes they support can save enormous amounts of time because the backups or archiving processes don’t have to wait for a manual command to start. There’s no latency and, as with the other automated processes, they run more consistently and with fewer errors. If you make these tasks a part of a connected and automated whole process, they start whenever they should, take predetermined evasive action in the event of a problem, and alert the right people as needed—automatically.

It might be time to re-think how you automate. It’s easy to see that automating the big processes helps you handle complex, interdependent procedures that might otherwise be impossible to manage. But maybe you should look at your other everyday tasks too. Automating your daily IT housekeeping tasks—and integrating them with the processes they support—can add up to big benefits over the long haul and help protect your enterprise from errors and failures.

The post Do You Really Automate the Whole Process? appeared first on Redwood Software.