The road to analytics excellence is paved with automation

As organizations become increasingly digitally enabled, the road is paved with many twists and turns. Data science teams and analysts, as well as the teams they serve, know well that the path to analytical excellence is not linear. The good news is that organizations have the opportunity to unlock value every step of the way. The pattern by which companies develop power within their data is highly repeatable, supported by more ways to manipulate data and unlock the benefits of automation.

While automation itself is not a digital transformation, because it doesn’t launch new processes, automation often delivers tremendous value and provides the framework for organizations to make major operational improvements. With automation, organizations can deploy more analytical approaches with modeling enhanced by AI and ML. Once these core capabilities move out of the exclusive domain of technical IT teams and into the hands of more domain experts, there will be a real transformation of business processes and more overall value will be extracted from analytics.

Delivering value from the start

Automation is typically one of the first steps in overhauling business analytics. In my experience, this step will not provide as much value as the steps that follow, but it is still significant and vitally important. Let’s take as an example a large manufacturer that automates its VAT collection process. While some may assume that this type of automation simply saves time, many businesses do not recover 100% of their VAT because the manual, legacy process incurs costs, and if VAT is below a certain value it may not be worth it to be reclaimed. .

When this process is automated, 100% VAT recovery returns become possible – the hard cash savings for the business cannot be ignored. Finance teams can automate many of the manual processes required to close their books each quarter, reducing the time it takes to close the books from weeks to days.

Audit teams can upgrade from manual audits that are repeated every few years to continuous audits that check for issues daily and report any issues automatically and immediately. From reducing costs and risks to increasing revenue and saving employee time (your greatest asset), automation is having a huge impact on organizations around the world. With this lens, it becomes clear that automation means much more than just saving time.

Two different approaches

There are two very different approaches that organizations have historically taken to drive automation. The first, which has a more limited impact, is to form a centralized team and have that small team try to automate processes across the company. The second approach is to scale employees, so that every employee is able to automate a process. This latter approach can scale at a very different pace and with a very different effect. Organizations can upskill tens of thousands of employees and automate millions of manual processes. This would be very difficult if a small team were trying to do the same automation. It can lead to significant business benefits, including higher productivity, lower costs and higher revenues.

Historically, of course, the latter approach has also been virtually impossible to implement – ​​given the requirement for familiarity with coding language to use code-heavy technologies. But that was then – today, where mature low-code systems offer a huge opportunity to upskill employees in automating processes, simply by asking the right questions. This is not just an alternative route; it should be the only route for organizations serious about pursuing analytical excellence.

Code-free platforms eliminate the need for departments to wait in queues for IT teams to deliver an application that meets their needs. It puts the power of automated analytics and development capabilities in the hands of business domain experts with the specific expertise needed to gain valuable insights from analytics faster. Therefore, upskilling efforts should be focused on enabling such a broad data-literate culture.

For many organizations, a common strategy for encouraging upskilling and skills is to target new hires. With turnover and growth rates at many companies ranging between 5 and 10%, organizations can face the challenge of replacing as much as a quarter of their entire team every 18 months. Providing training and technology for inevitable new hires to automate processes is therefore essential for any department to save time to increase efficiency and upskill the overall workforce.

This is already happening within the education sector, with many schools beginning to implement automation technologies and analytical techniques into their curriculum, especially in business schools and accounting, marketing and supply chain courses. Companies that fail to recognize this and prioritize these skills will likely not only continue to suffer from the inefficiencies of manual processes, but may also risk attrition costs if they fail to equip their employees with the modern tools that are learned in practice. basic curricula of these courses.

Automation is the first step to analytics excellence, but its relevance doesn’t end there. It is through automation that leaders can unlock clear, trackable benefits for their organizations in terms of overhauled processes and set them on the right path when it comes to upskilling and democratizing data.

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