Automation allows businesses to increase efficiency without expanding their workforce. The challenge is choosing the right automation technology that organizations can harness to adapt alongside their evolving systems, services, and products. Fortunately, with scalable automation tools, businesses can streamline operations, improve productivity, and grow their operations with little to no downtime.
What is Scalable Automation?
Businesses’ operational needs fluctuate, and organizations can expand or contract rapidly. For example, online stores experience exponential traffic during the holidays, start-ups can double in size in a year, and major enterprises can merge with other fortune 500 corporations. When these changes occur, businesses need scalable (easily adjustable) IT infrastructure to allow them to adapt quickly. Such malleable environments are critical to ensure data management and cloud services function consistently with high performance.
To support changing businesses, scalable automation software helps them prevent bottlenecks, guarantee capacity, reduce resource consumption, and predict potential issues to prevent system failures. In the process, such technology offers a range of features like automated data warehousing and workflow management.
Benefits of Scalable Automation
The ability to rapidly expand or contract operations in response to changing market conditions can mean the difference between success and failure in today’s business world.
A functionally scalable automation solution should support business success through features like:
- Allowing businesses to introduce new logic into workflows with simple mechanisms that don’t impact the current automation environment or functions
- Enabling users to change the behavior of current automation processes without changing the function itself.
- Empowering businesses to integrate new external applications into their infrastructure quickly.
Best Practices to Build a Scalable Automation Infrastructure
Automation is critical to healthcare, manufacturers, and financial services organizations, to name a few. However, it can be daunting to choose tools that IT staff and developers can easily use to grow and contract with businesses’ changing needs. That’s why decision-makers must follow best implementation practices and look for scalable features.
Select the Right Features
Businesses must look for automation platform attributes that are user-friendly and adaptable.
No-code, universal connectors: Universal connectors allow developers to drag and drop actions into process workflow to avoid wasting time scripting. Plus, these pre-built job actions serve as templates, allowing developers to repeat them for future jobs easily.
Low-code API accessibility Seamless API accessibility allows developers to integrate virtually any automation tool without spending time coding.
Alerting: This allows automation operators to set alerts based on pre-defined events such as a job failure or if the IT team hasn’t resolved tickets promptly, known as an SLA breach. In addition, email and SMS alerts ensure the tech team can remedy system issues promptly without business interruption.
Auto-remediation: This feature ensures operators don’t have to be physically present for a system to resolve workflow problems. By setting trigger rules, operators can outsource problem-solving, speeding up resolution time and allowing them to focus on higher-level IT tasks.
Self–service portals: Self-service portals provide businesses and IT help desk teams with simple interfaces for overseeing system processes. Users can conduct data transfers, run reports, and make updates from these permission-based portals.
Design Workflows in a Modular Fashion
Businesses must consider designing automation infrastructure in a modular fashion. This means breaking down the tools into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be chained together to create the overall solution. By thinking about automation this way, businesses can more easily scale it up or down as their needs change. Additionally, modular automation design makes it easier to troubleshoot and fix automation issues as they arise.
Another benefit of modular automation design is that it allows IT developers to reuse automation components that they’ve already created. This can save significant time and money.
Keep Automation Infrastructure Well-documented
One of the most important steps businesses can take to maintain control over automation infrastructure is to keep it well-documented. This means having clear and up-to-date reports on what automation tasks are taking place, how they perform, and by whom. Additionally, this documentation should be easily accessible to all team members, so everyone is aligned.
By keeping automation infrastructure well-documented, IT teams can avoid potential issues and ensure that your tasks are taking place correctly and efficiently. Additionally, this documentation will be invaluable if businesses ever need to change their automation system.
Types of Scalable Automation
Businesses can improve efficiency and quality while reducing costs by automating tasks prone to human error. Below are three types of scalable automation that organizations should consider using:
- Process automation: Automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, invoicing, and customer communication can free up employees’ time for more value-added activities.
- Reporting and analytics: Automated reporting and analytics tools can provide real-time insights into key performance indicators, allowing businesses to make data-driven decisions about allocating resources.
- Customer relationship management: A sound CRM system can automate sales and marketing tasks, making it easier to manage customer relationships at scale.
Conclusion
It is essential to implement scalable automation infrastructure to meet businesses’ needs. At qBotica, we specialize in helping enterprises build highly adaptable, scalable automation ecosystems that deliver real value. Our DoqumentAI platform enables businesses to start “thinking inside the bots” and derive maximum benefit from advanced data capture software. With our platform, enterprises can easily integrate with leading RPA products and enjoy scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. Schedule a discovery call today to learn more.
