Enterprise Automation—Solutions that Boost Businesses

As a business grows, the number of its employees grows in parallel. Suddenly, ordinary back-office repetitive and manual tasks such as document management begin taking an unacceptable amount of time and negatively impact other business processes. Sometimes it can take several days until the document reaches performers through the maze of approvals at companies that employ legacy systems in business operations. In organizations with thousands of employees located worldwide without enterprise automation, the situation can be even worse. And this is just one of hundreds of examples where human capabilities become a barrier to quick and effective task performance.

Imagine a situation in which software performs all manual back-office processes and reduces their duration dramatically, freeing up employees for higher-value tasks. Special scripts can run on corporate devices to simulate real users’ behavior, performing all rudimentary and repetitive tasks, and enterprise automation systems are a type of software solution that provides such capabilities. The potential of modern enterprise automation software is much more extensive than just reducing manual labor—it can empower businesses to address challenges in terms of productivity increase, quality improvement, and decreased costs. “But what is enterprise automation?” you may ask. Let’s answer this question in detail.

What Is Enterprise Automation?

So, what is enterprise automation? In general, this term means applying technology to streamline complicated processes, improve an organization’s efficiency, bring transparency to operations, and decrease costs. To achieve this, enterprise automation solutions are built on top of business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), business data analytics, and AI-based technologies. Enterprise automation tools unify all types of software systems used across an entire organization into a holistic and effective ecosystem tailored to specific business needs with ultimate security standards.

Levels of Enterprise Automation

Now, knowing the answer to the question, “What is enterprise automation?”, you can consider three stages of establishment and adaptation of enterprise automation:

Level 1: Basic Automation

Basic automation involves automating individual, repetitive tasks within a process. This level typically employs simple rule-based automation tools to streamline routine activities. For instance, automating data entry, invoice processing, or email responses can significantly improve efficiency and reduce human error. While basic automation offers initial benefits, its impact is limited to isolated tasks, and it often requires human intervention for complex decisions or exceptions.

Level 2: Business Process Automation

BPA focuses on automating entire business processes, encompassing multiple steps and departments. By integrating various systems and applications, organizations can create streamlined workflows that eliminate manual handoffs and reduce processing time. For example, automating order-to-cash or procure-to-pay processes can significantly enhance operational efficiency, improve accuracy, and accelerate cycle times. BPA helps to optimize end-to-end business operations and provides a foundation for more advanced automation initiatives.

Level 3: Integrated Automation

Integrated automation involves connecting multiple systems and applications to create seamless, end-to-end automated workflows. By breaking down data silos and enabling smooth data exchange, organizations can achieve greater process efficiency and improve decision-making. For instance, integrating customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain management (SCM) systems can optimize sales, inventory, and procurement processes. This level of automation often requires advanced integration platforms and data management capabilities.

Level 4: Intelligent Automation (IA)

Intelligent automation combines RPA with AI and machine learning to create self-learning and adaptive automation solutions. By incorporating cognitive capabilities, IA enables systems to analyze data, make decisions, and learn from experiences. This level of automation can handle complex and unstructured tasks, such as interpreting documents, understanding natural language, and solving problems. For example, IA can be used for fraud detection, customer service chatbots, and predictive maintenance.

Level 5: Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation represents the ultimate goal of automation, aiming to automate as many business processes as possible. It involves a combination of technologies, including RPA, AI, machine learning, and process mining, to discover, document, analyze, design, automate, monitor, and reassess business processes. Hyperautomation seeks to create self-optimizing and autonomous operations, enabling organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, agility, and innovation. By the way, you can learn more about the most promising tech trends for businesses here.

Benefits of Enterprise Automation Solutions

Enterprise automation is transforming the way businesses operate by integrating advanced technologies into their workflows. This shift is not just about replacing manual tasks with automated systems but about enhancing overall organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Below we will explore the numerous benefits that enterprise automation brings to modern businesses.

• Reduction of routine tasks. Thanks to the automation of tasks that company employees face every day (for example, it may be data entry or processing), routine work is reduced. Thus, they will be able to engage in more interesting and non-trivial tasks, which, in turn, has a positive effect on their productivity and involvement in the work process.
• Cost efficiency. This approach allows companies to gradually increase their productivity and scale without the need to expand staff. If we add to this the reduction in the number of errors, it becomes clear that automation allows businesses to achieve resource efficiency, also opening up new opportunities for development.
• Less errors. Automation measures can significantly reduce the number of errors associated with the human factor and also ensure the uniformity of data, regardless of the software in which they are used (learn about structured and unstructured data here). This leads to fewer mistakes in financial reports, customer records, and other critical entities, thereby simplifying the decision-making process.
• Speeded up operations. By reducing the number and duration of manual operations that automation provides, enterprises achieve accelerated delivery of products/services to their consumers, which ultimately determines their competitiveness.
• Improved customer satisfaction. By allowing for faster and more accurate processing of customer requests, automation increases overall customer satisfaction. In the long term, this has a positive effect on their retention rate and loyalty.
• Quick decision making. Many automation solutions are aimed at collecting enormous amounts of data, which can later be used to generate real-time analytics when using smart algorithms (for example, based on AI).
• Sustainable competitiveness. By boosting process efficiency and ensuring better customer experience, automated processes can provide enterprises with a strong and sustainable competitive advantage.

Key Challenges of Enterprise Automation

In this section, let’s consider possible challenges related to the implementation of enterprise automation.

Identifying Automation Opportunities

Not all processes can be automated. At the same time, it is important to understand that modernizing processes through automation solutions does not always pay off in terms of invested resources. That is why it is important to analyze operations that suffer from low efficiency and begin to apply automation gradually, as it pays off.

Barriers to Employee Onboarding

Like any other technological solutions, automation tools require onboarding from enterprise employees who will use them in their work processes. It is also worth noting that due to innovation, many of them may experience anxiety or, alternatively, make mistakes more often. In this regard, it is important for enterprises to plan a planned implementation of such solutions with accompanying training.

Data Quality and Integrity

Since any automation system uses enterprise data to one degree or another, this data must be prepared for this use: that is, be accurate and of high quality. This means that before implementing automation solutions, enterprises will have to perform a comprehensive audit of data sources, bring them to a suitable format, and, if necessary, clean up low-quality records.

Integration Challenges

Integrating automation tools with existing enterprise systems often involves complex technical challenges. Differences in data formats, systems architecture, and APIs can hinder integration efforts. Overcoming these obstacles requires careful planning, development resources, and potential customization of automation solutions.

Scalability Issues

As automation expands within an enterprise, scalability becomes a critical factor. Ensuring that automation systems can handle increased workloads, data volumes, and user demands without performance degradation is essential. Scalability challenges often require investments in infrastructure, system upgrades, and performance optimization.

Security and Privacy Risks

Automation introduces new security vulnerabilities, such as data breaches and unauthorized access. Protecting sensitive information requires robust security measures, including data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits. Enterprises must balance the benefits of automation with the need to safeguard sensitive data.

Process Complexity and Variability

Many business processes are complex, involving multiple steps, decision points, and exceptions. Ensuring automated business process management can be challenging due to their inherent variability and the need to accommodate different scenarios. Simplifying processes and standardizing workflows can facilitate automation.

Change Management

Implementing automation requires significant organizational change, impacting roles, responsibilities, and work processes. Effective change management involves developing a comprehensive plan, communicating the benefits of automation, providing training, and addressing employee concerns. Overcoming resistance and building support for change is crucial for successful automation adoption.

Enterprise Automation Strategy 

The choice of specific automation solutions, no matter what level they belong to, is, in fact, just one of the stages of a comprehensive enterprise automation strategy aimed at its own scaling and success. So, what specific steps should such a security automation strategy include?

• Assess your current situation. The first thing you should start with is analyzing the current business processes in your company to detect those areas where automation is irreplaceable: for example, where employees most often make mistakes or where downtime often occurs.
• Formulate your goals. Typically this implies eliminating delays in the delivery of products and services to end consumers, reducing the cost of regular business processes, minimizing the influence of the human factor, the need for scaling with moderate involvement of new human resources (or without it at all), etc.
• Select tools and technologies. Proceed with conducting end-to-end market research existing automation technologies – thanks to this, you will be able to identify solutions that best meet the needs of your enterprise – both from an economic and technological point of view.
• Create a comprehensive plan. Build a step-by-step plan for implementing automation. It consists of defining the sequence of actions, the resources available to you, and deadlines.
• Conduct a test deployment. Deploy your new solution in a test environment to make sure that everything works as you expected (or, conversely, detect problems and fix them in time. Regularly monitor the performance of the updated system and improve it as needed.
• Scale as needed. Since automation requires modernization and adaptation to changing business requirements, you can use monitoring data in the future, too, especially, for expanding your new IT infrastructure.

NIX Expertise with Enterprise Automation

Now that you know the answer to the question “What is enterprise automation?”, you can find out more about some of our relevant case studies.

Remote Staffing and Employee Management System

A global company that provides staffing and employee management services wanted to develop a holistic multi-functional employee management system to automate to perform three main tasks:

• Search for and recruit new staff 
• Process invoices for completed work and management of employee reports
• Provide 24/7 support for all user roles

The client obtained a scalable web platform that is highly configurable and provides ways for enterprise automation and enhancing HR, procurement, management, employee, and supplier workflows. The platform brings transparency and simplifies searching, recruitment, and payment processing, as well as brings all these activities into one place. In turn, recruiters can compete internally within the application that positively impacts company profitability.

Web Platform for Enterprise Resource Planning 

A 5000-employee technology company aimed to create an ERP platform from scratch that would integrate all operational processes in one place and optimize project schedules, balance workloads, enhance operations, and contain advanced enterprise automation capabilities.

They had a legacy monolith system that worked well previously but with a growing number of teams, users, and roles, it became a bottleneck for the company’s operations and further growth. The NIX team’s enterprise automation strategy implied transferring all the data and business logic to a new system with a microservice architecture that worked quicker and provided further opportunities for intelligent automation. Here are the crucial components of the delivered solution and their capabilities:

Time and Issue-Tracking System 

Tracking workload, productivity, and performance of individual members within the organization. The system also provides automated reporting capabilities showing a holistic picture of all processes inside the company. 

Enterprise Accounting Software 

The software syncs with a time tracking system and automatically calculates each employee’s salary based on their rate and logged hours. The accounting department reduced time spent on data entry, calculations, and error rates. The financial department can also automatically estimate profitability, forecast the company’s cash flow, and calculate cumulative, annual budgets for each period with the click of a button.

Employee Panel for Finance Activities 

This is part of the accounting software for the employees that brings transparency to employees and ensures secure data storage. Previously, financial statements were provided via email, increasing the chances of leaking sensitive data outside the company. Employees are now up-to-date with their finances such as monthly income, benefit management, and tax information.

Holistic Enterprise Knowledge Base

This is the CMS that contains all educational data curated in the enterprise. It provides rich customization options for all stakeholders and real-time content tracking (you can also learn more about our CRM integration and customization services).

The released ERP software helps the client automate business processes, enhance productivity, and increase the satisfaction index of employees. The enterprise automation features brought transparency to the company’s operations and the management is now able to see how each functional group contributes to the mission and vision of the company.

Conclusions

Enterprise automation is no longer a futuristic concept but a strategic imperative for businesses seeking to thrive in today’s competitive landscape. However, implementing enterprise automation is not without its challenges. Overcoming obstacles such as identifying automation opportunities, managing employee resistance, and ensuring data quality requires careful planning and execution. 

NIX, with its extensive experience in developing enterprise solutions, understands the complexities involved in automation initiatives. Our team of experts can guide you through the entire automation journey, from process assessment and solution design to implementation and ongoing support. By partnering with NIX, you gain a trusted partner with a proven track record in delivering successful automation projects. Let us help you harness the power of automation to drive your enterprise forward.