Want to understand the real value of automation in data management?
Well, we’ve sung the praises of automation on many occasions.
But there’s never a bad time to add to that and bring you more reasons to ditch the manual processes.
Let’s jump into exploring the importance of data automation in any data management strategy.
One of the strongest reasons for automation is that it will strengthen your data accuracy.
When you use automation for data loading, cleaning and integration, you’ll naturally reduce the likelihood of people making mistakes.
You’ll also boost your data quality when you use a platform, like CloverDX, that makes it easy to view all of your automated data pipelines from one interface. This brings excellent monitoring and error handling capabilities. You can be reassured all your data is flowing as it should be, and if something does go wrong, you can get alerted to it immediately and take action.
Tired of those tedious everyday data tasks? We understand.
By automating your data ingestion, migration, cleaning etc., you’ll move through data projects at a significantly faster rate. Instead of your IT teams slavishly massaging data so that it looks right, and then uploading it data set by data set, you can use automation to automatically move/process data according to your specifications without people actually having to touch it or spend time on it.
As a result, you’ll burn through your tasks lists and empower your workforce to focus on higher-value activities.
The great thing about automation is that not only do you save your staff time on data processes but the business itself also gets finished data and reports faster.
Because data processing can happen in almost real-time, you'll get your reports in mere minutes rather than a day later (by which time they may already be out of date). Naturally, this helps increase trust from business users in the data they're getting too.
Perhaps the easiest sell to the c-suite when it comes to automation is that it will also reduce your costs.
How does it do that?
Well, you won't have to hire more people to move faster or handle bigger data jobs. Also, your staff can now work on tasks that are of higher value (and more enjoyable for them). This means you can say goodbye to paying expensive, highly trained people to do boring admin stuff with your data.
Not only do you save costs on repetitive work, but automation also opens up the possibility for faster business growth. For instance, if your business is reliant on getting customer data into your systems, that process can be a real bottleneck to signing and onboarding more customers. There's a limit to how much you can speed up that process by just hiring more and more people (not to mention the additional cost - in money and time - that come from a larger workforce). By automating more of the data onboarding, you make it faster and easier for your customers, and faster and easier for you - allowing for growth without the need to increase headcount.
Another reason why automation is a crucial component of your data management strategy is that it enables you to standardize processes.
If you have a team dealing with thousands of data feeds, all in different formats, from different places, (and at a growing rate), your staff will complete processes in different ways. After all, they each have different skills and experience, so they'll take their own approach. This can be a problem because it can make it difficult to collaborate, audit, troubleshoot, and get a holistic view of everything that's happening.
With automation, there's one set process - it's standardized, and there's no variation or siloed processes.
We helped one of our clients, Gain Theory, standardize their processes with some strong results.
Before working with CloverDX, the process of making large volumes of data meaningful to make better decisions wasn't as efficient as it could be. It was also challenging to work with data in many formats and that sometimes required substantial amounts of cleaning.
Now, with the help of CloverDX, they standardize their data ingestion process so it's all more streamlined and consistent. As a result they can handle customer implementation at speed. Read the full case study here.
'Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.’ - Management Consultant and Author Peter Drucker
Efficiency is another compelling benefit to automation.
For example, if you want to analyze large volumes of data before you make a decision regarding your marketing, instead of manually loading and integrating data, you can automate the whole thing. Then, you can get the insights to make the decision in minutes, rather than waiting for hours or days for your IT team to handle it.
A great example of this in practice is the work we did for a wealth management firm. Thanks to automation, we were able to help them reduce the time it took to load data into Salesforce from 12 hours to 41 minutes, saving time and also delivering value faster.
When you bring in automation, you’ll inevitably deploy better products and services. Why? Because you’ll run a tighter ship that makes fewer errors and more compelling features.
As every modern business gathers and works with data to provide a service, you’ll also see this improved by automation. That’s because by automating your data ingestion and cleaning it on entry (with tools like Validator), data will immediately become cleaner. And you'll get your (more accurate) data faster, which means you can make more informed decisions faster.
In addition, now you’re using automation you can take on bigger challenges that are more resource-heavy. And, of course, your IT team (that maybe spent much of its time previously cleaning and uploading data), can now find ways to improve your product and processes directly. That long-overdue new feature or product you’ve been waiting to add? Now there’s time to actually take it to market.
And if your business relies on providing reports or data to your customers, they'll also benefit from the results of automation - your product or service can be hugely improved for instance by providing data and insights in near-real-time, rather than days old.
Agility and technology are key priorities for CEOs in a post-pandemic world of work. That's according to this report.
And what helps your company improve its agility?
That's right: better, more accurate, and more immediate data on how your business is doing, so you can make faster, more informed decisions.
To achieve this, you'll need automation. Indeed, automation is a keystone element to your data strategy that will help your business hit your wider business goals
When you choose a platform like the CloverDX Data Management Platform, you can build automation into your processes much more easily. You can define blocks of logic once and reuse across processes, projects or teams, and you can build cohesive data pipelines where steps happen one after the other, automatically. And you can see it all in a clear visual interface, so you know exactly what's happening where.
The real power of automation comes not just in individual data pipelines, but in the ability to automate entire business processes. From triggering processing based on events or a schedule (e.g. when a new file lands in a certain location, picking it up automatically and doing something with it; or having a process run every morning or every week - without the need for someone to push a button to make that happen), through to chaining multiple API calls together, so rather than multiple processes, the results of each call automatically feed into the next step in one unified flow.
CloverDX also enables you to bring in other 'service' tasks to your workflows to truly automate everything from A-Z. For instance, a CloverDX process to load your data warehouse can handle not just the data transformation jobs but also can take care of moving files around, executing external tasks or scripts and calling APIs, so everything really does happen on autopilot. And of course the process can encompass both data and technical error alerting/handling/reporting, so everything keeps flowing smoothly.
Discover what data automation could bring to your processes - download a free 45-day trial of CloverDX and get started today.