Dennis Walsh, President of Redwood Software Americas and Asia-Pacific, explains how cloud-based process automation provides better control at lower operational costs.
Over the decades, I’ve seen a lot of companies take some clever strategic moves to make the most out of their existing resources. In the 1990s, organizations began to invest heavily in ERP (enterprise resource planning) technology. Today ERPs are everywhere, but they require significant—and manual—support from the back office as well as frequent customization.
Recently Gartner announced that “by 2016, the impact of cloud and the emergence of postmodern ERP will relegate highly customized ERP to ‘legacy’ status.” They describe how companies have spent time, resources and effort customizing ERP implementations to build cost and labor efficiencies. Now they predict that organizations will look to the cloud for what they once attempted to accomplish through customization. I agree with Gartner, companies need to change their perspective. But the answer isn’t only in cloud applications; it’s also in process automation.
Minimize Effort, Maximize Results
Automation is the only way to dramatically improve process quality and speed at a significantly lower cost. It delivers structure, standardization and agility with less effort. ERP technologies provide a great basis for this kind of automation, but they don’t offer the complete flexibility and integration businesses need. That’s why so many organizations rely on customization and manual work to support their ERP.
Automation delivered as a service through the cloud provides the agility companies need—energizing processes already in place. Cloud services can be delivered whenever and wherever they’re required, aligning costs of operation with actual use. And with no additional infrastructure configuration to worry about, businesses are up and running in minutes. Cloud automation can connect resources, processes and applications across any enterprise.
For example, Journal Communications uses Redwood’s subscription-based automation service to coordinate and execute every aspect of its print media work—from circulation to distribution—across 20 different in-house systems. RunMyJobs significantly reduced the manual effort involved in managing these processes. Troy Hartfiel, IT Director, Journal Communications says, “We use it to bring together advertising, circulation, and billing applications in a highly changeable environment. If a subscriber goes on vacation and wants their newspaper delivery temporarily suspended, we have to respond quickly and accurately every time. Redwood ensures that we’re on target all the time.”
Cloud Innovation
For many companies, automation has been perceived as a challenge because of their complex enterprise and disconnected resources. This isn’t a problem anymore. When automation is delivered as a cloud-service, you can have it anywhere, anytime—and only pay for what you actually use.
Every organization wants to get the most efficiency possible from their investments, and with automation as a service this can become a reality. With business benefits such as more control and lower operational costs, the sky’s the limit.
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