Blog & Newsroom

Why You Need to Switch Your Finance Team’s Focus from Production to Analysis

The benefits of automation strike a chord with many business functions. Automation allows you to spend less time on grunt work and spend more on analysis and interpretation. Finance is by no means an exception. The manually intensive nature of control and production processes is a thorn in finance’s side. When it comes to the mechanics of producing financial reports and other analysis, finance teams will typically spend 70% of their total time extracting raw data from the many and varied systems they use by means of downloads,

Learn More

The Human Cause of 4 Major Accounting Errors and How to Eliminate Them

The reliance on manual controls and procedures remains a major cause of some of the most common accounting errors. We’re not just talking minor errors, such as an unmatched invoice, either. These manual processes result in material misstatements of financial results or business performance. All too often, they go out externally to regulators and investors. This is despite investment—even recent investment—in ERP systems, workflow software and various point solutions. And just to be clear, for this blog I am just talking about human error.

Learn More

Modern Workload Automation as-a-Service Is the Path to Your Future

In today’s fast-changing and disruptive digital world, the pressure for organizations to innovate has never been greater. Yet the reality at the coalface for many infrastructure and operations (I&O) folk is being stuck running in place, struggling just to maintain the status quo. The more things change… Organizations are now at a tipping point where maintaining legacy status quo in IT while also trying to innovate and transform with modern technologies and cloud architectures is no longer sustainable.

Learn More

Four Undetected Errors That Add to Close Stress – And How to Fix Them

Anyone working in finance knows how stressful the monthly financial close can be. Immovable, tight deadlines and the manual nature of much of the process results in long hours that impact staff wellbeing, turnover, and often result in a reliance on temporary staff at this peak time. Frustrated staff have to work within sub-optimal processes that have evolved over years and don’t have the bandwidth to redesign them. Some of the biggest headaches are the errors that accrue but go undetected during the month and only come to light at the height of the period-end scramble.

Learn More

Manage and Perform: Why Workflow Software Isn’t the Answer for Your Financial Close

When we talk about finance automation and how it can help make the period-end close a non-event by reducing manual effort and errors and improving visibility and control, some people wrongly believe they are already doing that. “But I already have workflow software,” is a common response I hear. The truth is, however, that while workflow software does indeed automate to a certain level it tackles only around 30% of the close process. It automates the reminders and some of the handoffs and handovers,

Learn More

Ditch the Spreadsheet and Make Your Close Faster and More Accurate with Finance Automation

The month end close is a busy and stressful time for any finance team. One of the key elements to maintain some order within this chaos is task or checklist management. It’s vital to ensure the hundreds of closing tasks are all completed successfully, on time and in the right sequence. The problem is that most organizations still manage their close checklist in a very manual and inefficient way. This creates more stress and errors for those carrying out the tasks and has a negative impact on the accuracy and timeliness of closing the books and reporting group figures.

Learn More

Why automating journal entry upload is just the tip of the period close iceberg

Journal entries are a necessary but manually intensive and time-consuming part of the financial close. For large multinational organizations, some companies within the group might easily process more than a thousand journals each month. We’ve dealt with organizations that do a million manual journals a year. Some level of automation is clearly required to handle that volume of journals, but most organizations are missing the big prize. Think of it like the tip of an iceberg.

Learn More

What’s the Secret to Making Your Close a Non-event? Focus on Automating the First Mile

What’s the secret to making your close a non-event? Focus on automating the first mile. The financial close is nothing short of an ongoing battle for many companies. Finance teams come under the same intense pressure at the end of every month, quarter and year as they struggle to complete the hundreds, if not thousands, of interdependent tasks that feed into the close process. At the same time the close is undoubtedly critical to trust,

Learn More

How Outdated Automation Leads to More Manual Effort—and What You Can Do About It

IT departments are under pressure. They must ensure the technology that supports their organization is always on and secure. They must also roll out the right new tools to support successful digital business strategy. And they have to do all of this with limited amounts of money, time and skilled people. Given this balancing act, the less manual effort required from IT staff, the better. IT pros should focus on innovation and increased value—not just maintaining the status quo.

Learn More

The Great Legacy Workload Automation Escape

“You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!” Readers of a certain age will recognize those eerie lines from the classic Eagles song “Hotel California.” While the meaning behind the tune’s lyrics has long been debated, the line quoted here is essentially about addiction. In a 1970s Hollywood rock star context, we all know what they’re singing about. Unfortunately, this sentiment is equally applicable to the (only slightly) less glamorous world of infrastructure and operations,

Learn More

Don’t Take Our Word for It – Experts Say Redwood Is a Workload Automation Leader

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits – easy implementation, scalability, flexibility, efficiency – of switching to a modern SaaS-based workload automation solution and how RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling can maximize these benefits. Now these benefits have been recognized by independent experts as well: Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) has named Redwood as Value Leader and RunMyJobs as the Best workload automation SaaS Solution in its 2019 EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation report.

Learn More

Fix Now but Pay Later: The Human Cost of Outdated Scheduling Tools

Legacy schedulers limit your agility to run effective automated processes to support your business. Without built-in connectivity to the wide range of applications, technologies and environments, you end up having to develop manual workarounds. With confusing “new day” scheduling that doesn’t follow on a real 24-hour timeframe, you’ll need more custom, manual workarounds. To compensate further, many teams using outdated schedulers have to create workload tasks and jobs that exist simply make sure other jobs execute properly.

Learn More

Find and Stop the Hidden Risks of Legacy Automation

Out-of-date workload automation tools can cause headaches for IT, but they also have wider implications for businesses that shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s likely you’ve read about what can happen: mammoth fines for data breaches, nightmare flight cancellations and communications outages. These incidents cost millions in revenue and productivity. They cost even more in lost goodwill and trust. These events often share something that’s not in the spotlight—technology that’s at the center of their processes—legacy scheduling and workload automation tools.

Learn More

Modern Workload Automation Improves Business Outcomes 3 Ways

We’ve already established that migrating to modern workload automation is easier than most people think. There are three key benefits that deliver guaranteed positive business outcomes. In “The Shifting Role of Workload Automation”, analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) found that a majority of IT and business professionals strongly agree that their organization could be made more efficient by upgrading their scheduling and workload automation tools. They’re right. Three of the most attractive outcomes of modern job-scheduling software are that they improve speed,

Learn More

It’s Payback Time – Eliminate Technical Debt from Legacy Scheduling and Workload Automation Tools

By Neil Kinson, Chief of Staff, Redwood Software It’s Payback Time – Eliminate technical debt from legacy scheduling and workload automation tools Moving to more agile and modern scheduling and workload automation (WLA) supports your goals now and into the future. It’s clear that organizations that have made the move are happy they’ve made the switch, too. Many IT teams are pleased to discuss how much more efficient they’ve become after upgrading their automation technology.

Learn More

The Challenges of Moving from Legacy Schedulers and WLA Tools (and How To Overcome Them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses – all too many – are caught between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’. The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome,

Learn More

Why So Many Schedulers? And Why It Causes Headaches

In an ideal world, a single technological solution would provide the answer to all your needs. If it fulfils the fundamentals of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) too, then all the better. In reality though, businesses rarely operate in such a straightforward way. Tools often duplicate some existing capabilities and omit other critical ones. But no one sets out with this goal. What actually happens is that someone has a problem, so they find a solution – it’s not the neatest,

Learn More

Process Automation for Unicorns – The Secret to Billion-Dollar Success?

Regular readers of the technology and business press will probably be familiar with the term ‘unicorn’ – first popularized back in 2013 by TechCrunch. It was used in an article about venture capital, and referred to the unlikely eventuality that any startup an investor backed would go on to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was also a fairly narrow definition, as it only looked at US-based software businesses started since 2003.

Learn More

Automate for Simplicity and Flexibility

In 1960, Vice Admiral Paul D. Stroop, chief of the US Navy’s weapon’s bureau at the time, put a plan in place to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of producing the Navy’s aerial weaponry. Project KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was born – and it’s a principle that’s still applicable to most enterprises today, despite the seemingly highly-complex, interconnected processes that drive them. Putting automation at the heart of processes is essential to achieve the always-on approach most businesses now require – and settling for time-based batch processing just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Learn More

How does automation-as-a-service work and what are the benefits?

The seismic shift to cloud-based services, both consumer- and business-facing, isn’t driven by a relentless dedication to using whatever’s hot in technology. It’s happening because this service delivery method brings specific advantages: cost, availability and uptime, to name just a few. According to the Forbes’ 2018 State of the Cloud report, 77% of enterprises have at least one application or portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. Many technology-oriented businesses aim to move 100% of services to the cloud.

Learn More

The Always-On Enterprise Can’t Exist Without Automation

By Darrell Maronde, Product Marketing Manager, Redwood Software There are few more visible examples of the so-called “always-on” enterprise than Amazon. Whether it’s one-hour parcel deliveries or provisioning an AWS cluster, your interactions with the company and the behind-the-scenes processes are almost fully automated. Each time a customer (or employee, for that matter) interacts with Amazon, a whole host of automated processes within the company’s sprawling IT systems seamlessly kick into gear to ensure that those packages are delivered,

Learn More

Upping the Ante: Process Automation Without Collaboration Between Business and IT Stakeholders is a Gamble That Won’t Pay Off

Attempting to roll out any new process or software across a business is always a challenge, but it’s one that can lead to a misguided disillusionment with automation if you don’t collaborate and work together. It isn’t just about identifying the right processes and tasks suitable for being handled by workload automation (WLA) technology such as RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling – it’s also getting the entire company on board with the plans. It’s about ensuring that departments don’t operate in disconnected siloes of information.

Learn More

Automated Scheduling in Action: How Whitbread Achieved Automation Success

Since the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to discussing the benefits of automation, as well as the real world costs and potential pitfalls of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA) solutions. And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey. Simplify the landscape One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing.

Learn More

The Risks of Out-Of-Date Automation Technology Part 3: A Decreasing Pool of Skills

In the final post of this three-part series, we examine the problems that can arise from a lack of key skills. Don’t miss parts one and two, which looked at sustainability and complexity issues associated with ageing automation technology and the costs of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA), respectively. Any company that relies on outdated automation and scheduling tools runs a plethora of different risks, some of which we’ve looked at previously.

Learn More