What Is Enterprise Automation?
Enterprise automation is the act of utilizing technology to increase efficiency across your organization through strategic automation and integration of internal processes. It’s complex and can be divided into 5 separate strategies.
Simple Automation
Simple automation involves using tools like:
spreadsheet formulas,
automated alerts,
custom dashboards,
scripts.
It’s the most basic form of automation that you can utilize to streamline simple, repetitive tasks. Almost every business uses simple automation to some extent.
Business Process Automation (BPA)
Business process automation utilizes complex software, to streamline whole processes and complete them without human intervention. It involves managing processes end-to-end. Let’s look at an example.
In simple automation, you can set up a spreadsheet to calculate the efficiency of your employees. However, they need to input the times manually. With business automation software, you track the time automatically and input it into your system, which calculates the data for you—your software takes care of the whole process.
Workload Automation (WLA)
Workload automation involves scheduling, initiating and executing business processes. It’s based on advanced workload automation software. Unlike other automation types, it’s focused on real-time execution. It centralizes enterprise-wide tasks and runs them simultaneously.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation is a form of enterprise automation in which you utilize robots to carry out manual labor automatically. It involves both software (to control and manage the robots) and hardware, adjusted to perform specific tasks.
We can find an excellent example in warehouse management. If you want to implement robotic process automation, you first need to invest in the robots and then in a warehouse execution system (WES), which will ensure that they execute their tasks as intended.
Integration Automation
Integration automation is a form of enterprise automation involved in aligning your data across the whole business. If you decide to implement it, you need to incorporate tools that will:
automatically collect data from different sources (e.g., various teams across your organization),
integrate the data into a single system.
Integration automation enables you to eliminate data silos and make data-driven decisions without the risk of making errors due to incomplete information.
Intelligent Automation
The most advanced strategy in enterprise automation is intelligent automation. It involves using AI-powered tools to streamline more complex tasks. You may also use it for processes you cannot standardize due to their unpredictability or lack of structure since AI can handle them.
For example, banks utilize AI-powered engines to categorize transactions. Standard measures, like scripts, fail to do that effectively. You can only categorize such transactions based on unstructured data, like the sender/receiver, the title, and the sum, but also the time of day when it was sent and many other variables, and artificial intelligence enables you to do that.
Which Type of Enterprise Automation Suits You?
Ideally, your enterprise process automation should involve all the types we mentioned above. However, it may take time to implement each of them. If you believe that you need to implement more automation in your business, do it step-by-step.
Start with the simple automation, which you likely already have. Then, proceed with business process automation and integration automation. Finally, invest in a tailor-made AI engine (if you want it to be effective, you need to have it developed specifically for your business) and take your automation to the next level. You’ll see the effects in higher productivity, reduction of human errors and lower operating costs.
Conclusion: Enterprise Automation Is Complex but Necessary
Enterprise automation brings new opportunities to the table, enabling you to boost your organization’s efficiency significantly. With the additional perks of data-driven decision-making and reduction of human errors, we can conclude that it’s necessary if you want to remain competitive and optimize your business – especially in the era of market slowdown.
Are you ready to implement enterprise automation? Time to find your software solutions! At Beta Systems, we can offer you our solutions for enterprise automation. Learn more about ANOW!
You may also read: What Is Workload Automation?