Do You Really Automate the Whole Process?

Posted on by
Reply

It always amazes me how often I come across customers who use powerful automation to complete many critical processes in their enterprise, but when they do; they overlook some of the most basic tasks that should be automated along with these processes.

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.

2012: The Year of the Streamlined Enterprise

Posted on by
Reply

While 2011 showed continued improvement over previous years, many IT organizations still faced budget cuts, delayed spending, changing priorities and sometimes—dramatically reduced resources. As businesses continue to recover and reorganize, IT remains squarely in the sights of the CFO. IT budgets are tight and business leaders keep asking IT to do more with less. The challenge now isn’t about finding the newest or most all-encompassing IT solutions. Instead it’s about finding efficient solutions that can be applied to the most situations. I’ve seen it all through the first quarter.

It’s much easier, faster and cost-effective to use fewer solutions to manage the widest variety of automation needs. Rather than filling an IT toolbox with a load of expensive tools that each do only one task, IT leaders are looking for high quality central solutions  that provide multiple purpose monitoring, management and orchestration that can help connect their entire enterprise with a minimum of agents.

A good solution should also help integrate your application workload too. For example, a comprehensive automation plan can back up your data warehouse once the day’s data upload has successfully completed. Automation can take these tasks out of your application process so that things are done more consistently and in the right context. This approach is not only more economical; it’s also more agile and can help make an IT enterprise faster and easier to manage.

After working with many companies on projects to streamline their IT resources and—literally—get more accomplished with fewer applications and agents running in the enterprise, I’ve started to recognize a trend in companies that are installing many agent on their servers to address specific needs. Gartner calls this “agent glut.” At Redwood we’ve had a great deal of experience reducing this problem quickly and easily.

Agent glut happens when a company, over the years, has implemented multiple software solutions each focused on solving an isolated issue. Every one of these solutions adds a new agent to the enterprise and, over time, the proliferation of agents makes administration and coordination more and more challenging.

It seems like everyone has a prediction this time of the year. My prediction for the rest of 2012 is that IT and business leaders will start to focus on this proliferation of agents along with traditional areas of improvement—like application lifecycle management—to continue to refine and better engineer their enterprises. When they do, they should consider the flexibility and power of an elegant automation solution. They should also evaluate cloud automation solutions as well, since these can offer even more flexibility and power. Chances are, it’s time to take a look at the number of agents in your enterprise.

Is Scheduling Dead?

Posted on by
Reply

With the advent of new “in-memory” technologies—like SAP® HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance), which is gaining profile since announced last year—many people I’ve talked to recently ask about what that means for traditional scheduling and automation platforms. Does it mean that scheduling is dead? Absolutely not.

In-memory technologies certainly do not mean that scheduling and automation aren’t important. On the contrary, in high performance environments scheduling and automation are even more important. With in-memory computing, the same processes still have to happen. They just happen faster. No matter how quickly they occur, these processes still need to be orchestrated both within the high speed environment and, critically, in context with the wider IT landscape. To do that, companies will need a fast, flexible, dynamic and event-driven automation solution.

In fact, the new high speed in-memory environments demand a solid and effective scheduling and process automation solution that can keep up with real time demands. For example, if you use a traditional data warehouse, you’re familiar with how they aggregate information as it comes in. That way, the warehouse is ready if or when a particular query is run. With in-memory computing, there’s no need for a data warehouse to build the aggregates in advance of a query. In-memory computing can enable business users to bypass the traditional data warehouse scenario and simply perform calculations or build a query in real time against the underlying high speed database. While this means that it takes less infrastructure (but more computing muscle) to get critical data, it doesn’t mean that these tasks don’t need to be scheduled, orchestrated and, in many cases, automated to work at optimum speeds. In many cases, the high performance computing environment is exactly the kind of environment that can benefit the most from automation.

One of the sector’s foremost analysts, Milind Govekar of Gartner, Inc., writes and advises about the current and future need for speed in business process execution. After talking with literally thousands of end-users and vendors, he has seen a trend towards what he calls the Zero-Latency Enterprise or ZLE, where data and information pass as quickly as possible through the business via Real-Time Infrastructure. I agree whole heartedly with Milind. I know that businesses demands—and will continue to demand—faster, more complete and more accurate data as the global economy and business environment continues to speed up. I also know that central to fulfilling this demand will be scheduling and automation solutions.

Part of the reason that scheduling and automation will continue to be important to any enterprise is that scheduling and automation are at the very core of what IT actually does (and has always done) best—execute repeatable processes quickly and precisely. Speed it up. Slow it down. Change the way it’s done in any way. IT still needs careful orchestration and scheduling to build automated processes that support any business. It’s a fundamental requirement. Zero-latency technologies like HANA only underscore the need for real-time process orchestration.

Three Reasons Why Automation in the Cloud is a Good Idea

Posted on by
Reply

At a trade show recently someone asked me if job scheduling and automation are suitable for cloud enablement. My answer was: “Why wouldn’t they be?”

Analysts and businesspeople alike have embraced the model of cloud services for all kinds for IT. Whether they view the cloud as a delivery model for a service or a “place” where they can store information, cloud enablement of any IT service adds flexibility, expandability and sheer ease. For many business and IT applications these factors are critical. The cloud is a great place for scheduling and automation for three main reasons:

  1. It fits the new model of IT.
  2. It decreases risk and initial expense.
  3. It fulfills increasing demands of business to do more with less.

The New Model of IT

For years, IT has been moving from a model that measured success by capacity, assets and functions to one that fulfils business requirements. Increasingly, IT is now measured not on overall infrastructure might, but on how well it performs business-critical tasks.

With cloud-enabled automation and scheduling, automation becomes a basic IT service that thelps run   the business. With cloud-based automation, administration and growth are completely flexible. You can control anything you need from anywhere. You can change a process or dependency on the fly and satisfy business needs in real time.

Reduced Risk and Cost

Cloud-based automation and scheduling   is easy to implement, cost effective and, as a service, can be cancelled at any time. When subscribing to a cloud-based model, customers can dramatically reduce the risk traditionally associated with IT changes. That’s because it’s not really an IT change—it’s subscribing to a service. Customers can sign up and test the service for a minimal cost. If it doesn’t work the way they want it to, they can cancel  and they haven’t had wasted investment in hardware or licensed software. Cloud services are all about giving customers the outcome they need—with a minimum of risk and effort.

Meeting Increasing Demands

Gone are the days when IT departments could demand the latest and greatest technology simply on the basis that they need it to keep things working. With piles of shelfware and billions spent on IT assets and applications that have never shown their value, we’re now in the era of tightening belts in IT – demonstrable returns have to be made. Many companies spend a significant portion of their IT time and effort working to drive down costs while driving up speed, efficiency and accuracy.

Cloud-enabled automation is the way that IT can emerge from the vicious circle of higher cost for higher performance. With automation as a service, customers only pay for what they need. The continuity and quality of the service are built into existing service level agreements (SLAs) so IT professionals can focus on the strategic results instead of simply keeping it working. As with other IT services, this is just another way that cloud-enablement makes delivering on business requirements fast, easy and flexible.

I’d like to thank my friend who asked the initial question. It’s a good one.

SAP® Solutions from Redwood

Posted on by
Reply

With process automation, your business processes become more streamlined, rational and consistent. You remove the element of human error and make once time-consuming manual tasks fast, self-regulating procedures. But to automate processes you have to automate and coordinate all of the underlying applications.

For SAP® users, this means aligning their SAP environment with any number of home-grown or purchased applications to get the maximum result from their SAP implementation. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)® describes six phases of application lifecycle management (ALM). The best way to implement enterprise process automation in an SAP environment is to align it with these best practices.

SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood (SAP CPS) gives you unique power to manage and automate critical business processes throughout the entire ALM cycle. Real-time, event-driven process automation and job scheduling with SAP CPS by Redwood delivers rapid returns on your investment; lowers your total IT costs, and helps you adapt quickly to changing customer and market demands.

With SAP CPS by Redwood you can successfully integrate and manage the execution and coordination of all of your applications. SAP CPS ensures compatibility with legacy, current and future business processing requirements while centralizing and simplifying how you control the scheduling and automation of all of your IT processes.

With SAP CPS by Redwood, you can reduce or eliminate latency in background workload processing while increasing online system availability. Ultimately, SAP CPS gives you a powerful automation tool that brings all of your processes together within your SAP environment. For more information about how Redwood can give you the SAP solution you need, visit www.redwood.com.

For Maximum Value: Think Business Process Automation

Posted on by
Reply

You might think of job scheduling as simply a means to an end. But, in reality, scheduling is the engine that runs the IT that supports your business. At their core, the business processes facilitated by job scheduling software are simply 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 processes as a whole, job scheduling transforms into process automation.

You can start by looking at exactly what makes up business processes. They are more than just jobs; more than just procedures. For business process automation to really work it must combine passive (or analytical) automation, process-based automation and active automation into an architecture that incorporates business rules and service level agreements (SLAs).

And the benefits increase as you scale up. With enterprise-wide process automation, business outcomes themselves are driven by technology—without the need for constant manual patchwork to keep the processes functioning. The more processes or steps you automate, the less time you spend manually pushing them through. The more repeatable and automated processes are, the faster you get results. If you apply this to your enterprise, the benefits grow even more.

The key to competitive advantage is proactive management of, and response to, changing business demands and requirements. Cronacle and SAP™ CPS by Redwood enable real-time business requirements to drive process automation, offering unmatched agility, efficiency and scalability.

By dynamically recognizing and responding to business events, Redwood ensures that critical business processes maintain priority. Process problems are immediately detected, recovery actions automated, and relevant business and IT users notified to ensure up-to-the-minute awareness of process status. One retail customer, for example, took a whole series of disparate individual tasks involved in reordering stock and combined them into a single automated process. It saved them enormous amounts of time and money. Find out more at www.redwood.com.

Business Process Automation can help keep your CFO, CEO and CIO happy

Posted on by
Reply

Keeping your boss at the C-suite happy is a full-time job. Every day you have to manage his or her expectations as well as the tenuous balance of people, processes and technology you oversee as an IT leader. Somehow, you’ve got to keep everything working—even improving—as you cut costs, increase efficiency and expand the business.

The key is to anticipate what drives your C-suite and explore the best practices that will keep you ahead of their concerns, requirements and demands. Don’t wait for them to come to you with problems or requests. Be proactive, process-minded and remember their goals. It’s easier to do than you might think.

Business process automation—on any scale—can help you reach your IT goals by improving productivity, work quality and flexibility all at once. And it all starts with job scheduling software. Scheduling isn’t just the day-to-day batch processing of specific, isolated tasks—it’s the foundation of real business process automation.

Redwood’s enterprise process automation and scheduling solutions, Cronacle and SAP™ CPS by Redwood, continuously optimize the underlying systems of business-critical processes using logic tied directly to your business policies. The platform-agnostic architecture enables you to build and maintain responsive business processes with the speed and reliability you need to secure market leadership and sustain profitability. With Redwood there’s no need to create lengthy scripts to build complex job scheduling chains.

What you have already created can be easily brought into our process logic without a painful rip-and-replace process. From the start, you can manage and control your business processes, easily connecting events, alerts and actions into a complete enterprise-wide automation solution. So you can start and end wherever you like and move at your own pace. Find out more at www.redwood.com.

What does Enterprise Process Management Mean?

Posted on by
Reply

Redwood Software helps businesses reduce the cost of running their enterprise wide business processes, eliminating the need for repetitive and error prone manual tasks, as well as improves those processes by making them more reliable, faster and more transparent. At Redwood, we call this Enterprise Process Management. In essence, it’s about improving productivity, lowering the cost of doing business and reducing risk.

But taking what can seem like something a little abstract to something more tangible can be better explained by an example. Take a typical business process such as the financial period end close, where companies need to reconcile and close their books for a financial reporting period. This typically involves many manual activities and usually requires the need to take information from multiple financial applications and systems (imagine a company with many subsidiaries for example). It’s understandable that the processes to achieve a financial close are typically overseen though the use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are the standard tool of a finance person but there has to be a better, more accurate and reliable way for a business to gain transparency of all the steps necessary to undertake the close process.

That’s where Enterprise Process Management comes in. It connects and orchestrates the critical business processes across all the disparate technologies and platforms across which a business process resides.  Wherever there are multiple applications and platforms used for a business process, this is typically where there is an opportunity to make a positive difference. By the same token, Enterprise Process Management also provides greater transparency to the business of the status of underlying critical processes.