How enterprises can maximize the value of automation [Q&A]

The idea of automating processes has of course been around since the industrial revolution. But even though we've moved on from the Spinning Jenny to artificial intelligence, automation has lost none of its importance.

So how can enterprises ensure that get the most from their automation in today’s complex world? Devin Gharibian-Saki, SVP of strategic automation at Redwood Software, believes that part of the key is to have an automation fabric. We talked to him to learn more.

BN: What are automation fabrics?

DGS: An automation fabric is a cohesive and integrated framework that seamlessly connects various automation tools, processes and data sources. It acts as a central nervous system, enabling seamless communication and collaboration among disparate business activities, applications and environments, driving mission-critical business processes across any tech stack.

BN: What are current pain points where automation fabrics are needed?

DGS: The purpose of automation fabrics is to make processes within enterprises better. Every process has different challenges from a business perspective. For example, if you’re a retailer, you want to make sure you can stock your shelves as much as possible so your customers can buy whatever they want in-person. If you have an e-commerce platform, you want to make sure you can process orders and ship the items as fast as you want. If you're a utilities firm, you want to make sure you have the most accurate bills to send to your customers in a timely fashion. All of that said, the improvements within an industry are very specific to each business process.

The pattern across every industry is the fact that the end customer wants things faster, easier, customized and at a better quality. Automation fabrics help accomplish the needs of the end customer while also reducing headaches of the workforce who is delivering the service or product.

BN: What is the future of automation going to look like?

DGS: Automation is important now more than ever as businesses and their applications/systems have gotten more complex. The role of automation has been increased and will continue to increase due to the complexity that enterprises deal with daily.

Automation is going to surface in different areas with business leaders using AI in their business. Leaders will need to ensure the data they use to feed into AI is managed properly in an automated fashion. The nature of automation fabrics will continue to become more relevant and needed to support workforces and end customers.

BN: How can organizations maximize the value they get from automation?

DGS: I would encourage enterprises to not think automations are transactional systems. When you're dealing with the business applications that everyone is working with, you’re thinking transaction steps. 'Oh, I have to post an invoice.' 'I have to raise a purchase order.' 'I need to create a customer invoice.' It is all task, by task, by task. This results in employees losing the sight of the automation fabric.

People are so specialized in their roles; they only see their small snippet of the work. Since organizations are siloed into different departments, employees are often design fragmented and fail to step out of their silo to see the whole end-to-end value chain.

I recommend enterprises to think holistically about optimizing the value chain in an automated fashion. This should be a muscle that all organizations train because it will maximize the value from the automation rather than being very narrowly focused on each individual task.

BN: Why is it important to consider the impact on employees and customers?

DGS: Ultimately employees and customers should be the ones who benefit most from automation fabrics, as they can get better products or services, they get better quality of service as things are now faster or more transparent, and ultimately they should also have less effort.

That's where you should always start from, working your way back to the processes and systems of your organization -- to understand which automation fabrics will have the best impact on your business.

In the past, people often felt threatened by automation or AI, but that's not required. Automation helps workforces with mundane work such as copy and pasting data from a spreadsheet to a web portal. Automation fabrics give workforces time to do the tasks that actually make an impact and raise their brain cells accordingly. That's what is most beneficial for employees in these organizations.

Customers just want the best service. If you want to order something online, you want to click a button and get the item the next day. You don't care how it's done.

With all that said, to understand the impact, it's about getting automation fabrics to a win-win situation for every employee and customer involved.

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