For modern businesses, data is the key.
Handling, processing and analysing data can become a significant challenge with exponential growth. In fact, it can become a tedious task that can make you rethink your day-to-day business operations or even bring them to a halt if you’re not well-equipped with the required tools and knowledge.
So, how would you collect, clean up, and put together the data for optimum utilisation in your business processes, without hiring additional staff? The answer is data automation. In this article, we will highlight the importance of data automation and its potential to support business growth and transformation. But before we dive in, let’s understand what data automation is.
Data automation is the management, handling and processing of business data with the help of automated tools, to eliminate the need for manually performing these tasks.
Three common elements of the data automation procedure are: Extract, Transform, and Load. These processes are categorised in the following three steps:
Data automation can be implemented by scheduling jobs, creating data maps and automating them based on specific triggers/events/actions.
It’s important for your business to analyse the data, which will enable your company to make correct decisions and progress in the right direction. Data automation makes it easier for your team to perform data analysis and extract essential business insights. This way it enables you to focus on the most important aspects of your business: growth and scalability.
Collecting and processing huge volumes of data coming in from multiple sources isn’t an easy job. Also, data extracted or collected from different sources may vary in format, making it important to standardise and validate it, before loading it into a unified system you rely on for business computing. Needless to say, it would require your team plenty of time and manual effort for extracting, transforming or loading the data. Data automation can save your team from these challenges by minimising manual intervention, which will result in time savings and increased productivity.
Data automation makes it effortless to propagate the changes made to the data at the source level throughout your enterprise system. You can simply schedule jobs to get triggered by specific actions or events, such as a value change/update. This can improve significantly improve business efficiency and performance, by making your business processes run smoothly without the need for manual intervention.
The more manual intervention in the handling and processing of business data, the higher the risk of potential errors. A single error in the processing or loading of the data can affect your business operations or even bring it to a halt temporarily. You can reduce the risk of such errors significantly with the help of automated data validation, ensuring that the data being loaded into your enterprise system is well-structured and accurate.
Data automation can prove helpful in making your business processes more sustainable in the long term, especially when your business is growing and you are channelling your resources towards data-driven business initiatives.
If you would like to learn more about data automation or make it an integral part of your enterprise system, contact our team of data automation experts today!
