Automation used to be a tool that was almost exclusively used in the most technical areas of the business—developers, IT operations, and maybe one or two ambitious business users that could write a macro.
“Now its impact is much further reaching,” says Kevin Vliet, Director of Product Management at Fortra. “I would argue that many businesses earn their margins by automating repetitive tasks and reserving their worker’s time for the highest-level operations.”
According to Kevin, to get the most out of automation, your company should embrace an end-to-end automation strategy. “At the end of the day, if you just hand your teams a bunch of miscellaneous automation tools, it’s not necessarily going to create long-lasting assets for your business.” But with end-to-end automation, you can bring together everyone from business to IT to digitally transform your organization.
What is End-to-End Automation?
Simply put, end-to-end automation is the ability to automate processes from the front-end, to the back-end—and everything in between. Front-end automation streamlines tasks focused on interactivity, websites, and attended processes from the user-interface (UI) level. Think of processes like website data extraction, report generation, and data entry. Back-end automation handles the unattended processes and leverages APIs for specifically defined, high-capacity transactions. Think of items like batch processing, database processing, file movement, and PowerShell scripts.
Bringing these approaches together gives your organization a holistic approach. End-to-end automation can give you a complete solution that brings your tech stack together and ultimately helps your business run more efficiently while optimizing resources. This is especially helpful for organizations that are struggling to get a grip on a complex web of IT processes running across a wide variety of applications and platforms.
“The goal is to be efficient and complement the various applications and technologies you bring into your organization to drive your business forward,” Kevin says.
Here are just a few of the most important benefits of end-to-end automation:
- Enforce cross-platform and cross-application dependencies for workflow unification
- Improve consistency and reliability of process execution
- Reduce cost and management effort while improving accessibility within the organization
- Gain a consolidated view of what’s going on across the entire environment
- Automatically identify and respond to issues should they arise
- Provide timely, targeted, and personalized notifications for when manual intervention is required
Solutions for End-to-End Automation
To achieve end-to-end automation, you’ll need to build a strategy using a couple different types of automation solutions that can work together—not in silos. The main components of a solid foundation are workload automation and robotic process automation.
Workload automation (WLA) handles the back-end IT processes that keep your business going. WLA and enterprise job scheduling are designed to schedule, initiate, run, and manage IT tasks related to any business process and transactions. It’s often most used by IT operations teams.
Robotic process automation (RPA) tackles the front-end business processes. By using software bots as digital coworkers alongside your human employees, RPA eliminates the repetitive, manual tasks to boost productivity so your team can keep their focus on more strategic work.
Achieve End-to-End Automation with Fortra
Fortra is an automation software company that offers leading automation solutions—from the desktop to the server to the network. With the right automation tools, your business can increase productivity, reduce operational costs, improve accuracy, and maximize efficiencies across your IT and business processes.
Stop relying on manual processes or custom scripts. Take back control and embrace a holistic approach to automation—from the back office to the front office. It’s possible with automation solutions from Fortra.