The modern-day C-suite demands faster close cycles, real-time data and airtight compliance. Regulators want transparency. Employees expect meaningful, high-value work. And there’s something that can offer all of these: automation.

Finance automation technologies fundamentally shift efficiency, accuracy and strategic decision-making. Those taking automation seriously instead of merely digitizing old processes are the ones pulling ahead.

Let’s take a look at how seven companies in various industries took key steps in building their automation fabrics using Finance Automation by Redwood and what you can take away from their experiences.

Allianz: Precision in policy and claims processing

Allianz, a global leader in insurance, faced a familiar industry challenge: complex policy management and slow claims processing. Manual processes were affecting their response time, frustrating customers and creating compliance risks.

By automating policy issuance, renewals and claims workflows, Allianz transformed its back-office efficiency. Claims processing times dropped, data accuracy improved and customer satisfaction soared.

Lessons learned

In insurance, speed and accuracy determine profitability. Slow claims processing is inefficient, of course, but more significantly, it erodes customer trust. Allianz’s success proves that automation is no longer a competitive advantage but a necessity. If you’re still relying on manual management of key financial processes, you’re inviting inefficiencies that could directly impact your customer retention.

Read the full story for more insights.

Arla: A smarter approach to financial closing

Arla Foods, an international dairy cooperative, struggled with fragmented financial processes that dragged out period-end closing. 

Automating 73% of its reconciliations cut the close process by four days. At the same time, the team enabled monthly reconciliation and settlement of energy taxes, which made their finances more predictable and significantly improved cash flow.

The Head of Finance Program Office noted Finance Automation’s user-friendliness and “solid SAP integration” as standout factors in their success.

Lessons learned

Finance teams fuel your business agility. If they’re forced to spend excess time on manual close processes, they’ll inadvertently get in the way of decision-making. It’s an unnecessary financial risk you’re taking at the end of every period. Arla’s transformation demonstrates how freeing it can be to apply the power of automation.

Read the full story and get inspired to review your team’s manual efforts.

Energy Transfer: Thousands of hours of untapped productivity

As a Fortune 500 energy company that engages in frequent M&A, Energy Transfer is understandably concerned about efficiency. Bank reconciliations and compliance processes had become overwhelming, and the company’s Accounting team was spending 80% of its time “wrestling with data” and just 20% analyzing and using that data.

Automation delivered an incredible 45,000-hour annual recovery by streamlining journal entries and reconciliations. Energy Transfer also improved capital project settlements and SAP user access provisioning for more secure and smooth operations.

Lessons learned

What could your finance team do with 45,000 reclaimed hours? With this transformation, Energy Transfer proved that automation is an enabler. Manual reconciliation is a waste of high-value talent.

Read the full story to see the additional soft savings the company attained.

Forvia: Strengthening controls

Forvia, a global automotive parts supplier, needed stronger financial controls, lower costs and greater efficiency. It had one Shared Services team handling record-to-report (R2R) and three other mission-critical business processes and needed to simplify its 20-step journal entry process to take some burden off this team.

By automating 80% of journal entries, Forvia eliminated silos across regions and countries and developed a straightforward audit trail.

Its Global Finance Transformation Director called Redwood Software’s solution “a robust, high-performance, secure, stable and scalable platform for end-to-end process automation.”

Lessons learned

In industries with razor-thin margins, finance leaders can be intimidated by the prospect of automation and the major changes it brings. But Forvia’s story underscores that automation in these instances can make processes truly bulletproof — in other words, it’s worth overcoming the worry rather than staying stagnant. 

Read the full story to learn why Forvia sees Finance Automation as its “ERP’s best friend.”

Genentech: Enabling lifesaving innovation

A leader in biotechnology, Genentech faced an uphill battle in managing research data and regulatory submissions. After experiencing frustrations with other popular tools, the team realized Redwood offered a more unified, end-to-end approach.

Genentech cut close times by 50%. Automation helped the company collect and analyze clinical trial data more efficiently. Plus, it streamlined regulatory approvals and improved collaboration across R&D teams, getting lifesaving treatments to market faster.

Lessons learned

For companies at the forefront of innovation, automation is a catalyst for accelerating R&D. Automating data-intensive tasks can help you focus (or refocus) on your company’s mission.

Read the full story to see why this investment also improved employee retention.

Jabil: Manufacturing efficiency via automated R2R

Jabil is a global manufacturing giant that faced the consequences of a lack of standardization and R2R process consistency. Across its nine global sites, the company spent 240,000 hours per year on the close process alone.

Jabil created a dedicated Finance Digital Transformation team to remedy this problem. With automation, they reduced reporting errors and improved real-time financial insights. Their finance function now operates at the speed of the business.

Lessons learned

Every manual touchpoint in financial processes is a potential error waiting to happen. Jabil’s move to automation highlights a critical reality: Finance teams should focus on analysis and not fixing preventable mistakes.

Read the full story and learn how to follow suit by automating your record-to-report processes.

Siemens: Scaling across global operations

Siemens Global Business Services (GBS), which operates in many industries, launched a massive internal digital transformation program called SHERPA X. Making financial processes more efficient and reducing the risk inherent in service provider dependencies was a priority.

The company implemented Finance Automation for journal entry management, close orchestration, fixed asset management and intercompany transactions. In 2024, they created an in-house Center of Excellence (CoE) and rolled out the account reconciliation module, which became part of their corporate standard. It reduced manual R2R tasks from 1,000 to just 30. With 70 entities approved and planning to go live in 2025, Siemens is building automation into the foundation of its finance strategy.

Lessons learned

Siemens’ approach highlights the fact that automation is never a one-off project. They’re demonstrating how to scale automation across complex, global finance operations while delivering massive efficiency gains. What does that say about your company’s ability to do the same?

Watch the webinar to hear the story straight from the CFO at Siemens.

Write your transformation story 

These companies didn’t just automate a few tasks. They rewrote how their finance functions operate. And they’re not alone. The shift to finance automation is happening across every industry, and if you wait, you’ll have to scramble to catch up.

What’s stopping you from joining them today? If it’s fear of change, disruption or making the wrong choice, know that doing nothing is the biggest risk of all.

Explore what could be possible if you’re willing: Read our free guide to achieving the touchless close.

Redwood Software was a gold sponsor of this year’s events in Orlando and Barcelona and a 2024 Pinnacle Award winner. I witnessed a new level of enthusiasm from SAP customers to learn how to extend and optimize their investments in SAP with an established partner solution like Redwood.

We had many great conversations at our booth about a range of topics:

• What’s new in the world of workload automation (WLA) and job scheduling
• How to optimize SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BTP with end-to-end automation
• How automation can help you close your books faster

We also conducted plenty of RunMyJobs by Redwood demos on the show floor, and some attendees set up future meetings with key Redwood executives to find out how to ensure WLA is part of their RISE with SAP digital transformation and journey to cloud.

From these conversations and intriguing keynote presentations from SAP CEO Christian Klein, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and others, I came away with three consistent learnings across my interactions with SAP leaders, customers and other partners.

1. Clean core is the de facto standard of SAP strategies.

SAP is advising all customers and partners that any approach to new implementations, existing system maintenance or further enhancement and optimization of an SAP investment must rely on a clean core strategy. This is the only way to effectively leverage SAP’s technology innovations.

Furthermore, using SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the only viable way to extend and customize your SAP ERP investment to keep a clean core. If you’re integrating, extending or enhancing SAP technologies and processes without using SAP BTP, you should stop and ask yourself: Why? SAP BTP is the most efficient and feasible way to do all of the above — and it safeguards a clean core approach.

2. Moving your SAP ERP to the cloud is not optional.

Transitioning your SAP environment to the cloud isn’t a debatable decision anymore. SAP sees this as much more than a technical upgrade. In fact, it’s the only reasonable way to continue adopting new innovations and upgrading existing systems across SAP and non-SAP solutions. 

If you aren’t already in the cloud, in the process of moving over or planning to do so soon, you’re merely incurring technical debt and will be left in the proverbial dust by your industry peers. 

3. SAP partner solutions are driving the next wave of innovation. 

Perhaps the most surprising and compelling theme was SAP leaders’ evident recognition of partner solutions and innovations as the keys to advancement. Discussions about partners’ impact focused on AI and extending the ERP environment to make the most out of your SAP investments. 

SAP sees its install base as the world’s largest repository of business information. Going forward, partner use cases and innovations will unlock the potential of that data to optimize and enhance business processes and decisions for all SAP users. 

This will be particularly true as advanced automation and new AI use cases come to market. While ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies are at the forefront, producing new content such as text, images, music and even code, SAP’s leaders believe it’s leading the charge in the realm of “business AI.” They define the concept as solving business problems and improving operational efficiency in various functions like finance, supply chain, customer service, HR, etc.

SAP partner solutions and innovations will drive the next wave of business AI use cases and customer adoption of SAP systems. New AI scenarios will only be as good as the reliability and timeliness of the data pipelines feeding their large language models. RunMyJobs supports these efforts by autonomously securing and executing those pipelines so future SAP AI use cases contribute to the business outcomes customers intend.

Couldn’t attend SAP Sapphire? You can still engage with us to learn why RunMyJobs is SAP’s #1 job scheduler. Read our guide to future-proofing your SAP ecosystem.

I consider myself an automation enthusiast. The efficiency it can bring to the business world is irrefutable. Yet, staying in touch with the humans who use and benefit from automation is vital. 

Nurturing the delicate balance between cutting-edge technology and our innate instincts to work together is what truly excites me.

Having been a non-technical user of various enterprise software platforms before being on the IT side, I’ve witnessed firsthand the trepidation and skepticism surrounding automation among business users. I started out as a temp in an Accounts Receivable department, then became a Billing Coordinator and a Reporting Systems Analyst. While I learned the value of consolidating my day-to-day tasks by building my own automations, I saw that others who weren’t as familiar with automation design feared job displacement.

The reality is far from that scary picture. Automation is not about replacing jobs but empowering individuals to operate analytically rather than mechanically, thereby enhancing the value of their work. Unfortunately, IT teams are removed from the work they seek to automate in many organizations. This can cause them to miss the mark when trying to maximize the value of automations.

In my experience, roughly 80% of the success of any platform implementation and adoption hinges on proper and effective communication between IT and the end-users who will feel the impact of their automation initiatives. To demystify automation and encourage its adoption, business users must be part of essential conversations as early as possible.

Here, I’ll share the method our IT team at Newsday uses to effectively collaborate with our business users as we develop and revise automations in RunMyJobs by Redwood.

A framework for workload automation design with business users 

Anyone in IT knows digital transformation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not just technical users who need to understand why and how your company will use new technology. With something as powerful as automation, everyone must be in the know to get maximum benefit. That’s why I’ve developed a four-step process we use at Newsday to ensure a high success rate with automation adoption and minimize any negative impacts on business operations.

Step 1: Analyze potential jobs to automate with “The three Cs”

As with any other essential business process, this one begins with planning. Instead of diving in and completing automation requests without understanding the conditions and goal, we want to ensure maximum value for all stakeholders by exploring each process in detail. Thus, we need to distill requests with the help of each team involved before we do any work in RunMyJobs. To do so, we use an approach I refer to as “The three Cs.”

Context

First, we need context about the process — the standard who, what, when, where and why, plus some extra flavor.

• Who is this process for? Does it depend on other people? Are there approvals?
• What process does the team or person need to do? What steps must they take for this process to be complete?
• When and how many times per day/month does this need to happen?
• Where does this all happen? Does another system need to ingest the output? Is there a middleware application?
• Why does this process need to take place? Should it be a candidate for workload automation (WLA)?

Collaboration

Next, to avoid unwanted surprises, we need to map out the entire process and identify all parties involved from the get-go. An inclusive approach ensures a smoother adoption of automation. More importantly, it gives people a sense of ownership and accountability. That way, they’re more receptive to change.

Rather than inundating our colleagues with meetings, we like to gather information efficiently, asking questions like, Who prepares information in this process? Where does that information go? Are there dependencies?

Consolidation

As we compile details about each process, we often discover redundant processes. Many times, parties are unaware that they have mirrored processes with different destinations or that a process already exists for what they want to accomplish. Leveraging RunMyJobs templates helps us quickly find instances of repeat processes.

Benefits of using this automation design method  

While I’m clearly a fan of automation, I recognize it’s not always the answer. Sometimes, the effort required to automate a task outweighs the potential benefits, meaning it’s more efficient to continue manual operations.

Newsday’s current onboarding process is a good example. It requires interactions between ActiveDirectory, ServiceNow, Workday and OracleFusion. As the on-premise subject matter expert on Workday and OracleFusion, I am familiar with all these systems. Still, the lift of automating them outweighs the benefits from a monetary standpoint. My time is best spent on revenue-generating or higher-visibility projects.

Step 2: Document processes and conversations with business users

At Newsday, teams have historically developed their own manuals and operating procedures, but since adopting RunMyJobs, we’ve begun developing end-to-end documentation for wider visibility. Having a record of automation design steps helps us align on process flows and expected outcomes and gives each person a stronger sense of how they fit into the larger company ecosystem.

With solid documentation, it also becomes simpler to establish consistent SLAs and recovery procedures, so we have clarity when answering to various teams and business leaders. 

Step 3: Diagram your workload automation designs

For many of us, workflows make more sense when they’re in a visual format, and automation designs are no exception. When our IT team shares workflow diagrams with business users, we find it enhances their understanding and results in stronger feedback. This is a pivotal step in refining designs before development begins.

A proper workflow diagram outlines every step of an automated task from initiation to completion. At Newsday, we use tools like Vizio or Markdown (with the Mermaid JS plug-in) to generate charts that are easy to interact with. Business users can quickly critique these diagrams and identify inaccurate time frames or potential inefficiencies. They can see exactly how their inputs and daily work fit into the complete automation. 

In this iterative part of the process, we encounter lots of insightful discussions and opportunities to improve our collaboration methods. Spending a bit more time at this stage reduces costly reworks down the line.

Step 4: Disseminate workflow designs and automations in development

Once our workflow designs and diagrams receive the green light, they need to be shared across relevant teams and departments. Whether via a shared drive or knowledge base, this effort at continued transparency is a strategic move. It ensures we only expend the resources to design automations once we have full buy-in. Thus, we run into fewer roadblocks and can turn around new automations much faster than we would be able to without widespread collaboration.

The impact of collaborative automation development

Those of us in charge of building automations love the all-hands-on-deck approach, but it doesn’t just make our jobs easier. There are clear benefits for every person and use case. Here are a few that our employees have experienced.

More impact from each role

For Newsday, well-designed and collaborative automation initiatives have proven to be catalysts for enhancing job satisfaction, fostering creativity and driving innovation. Contrary to some individuals’ fear of being replaced, there’s been a boost in morale as contributors have stepped away from mundane, repetitive tasks and shifted their skills and time to influencing business outcomes.

For example, in Finance, automation has revolutionized how we process and analyze data. The staff spend far less time compiling numbers, drowning in spreadsheets and building reports and get to focus on higher-value tasks and decision-making. They’ve gotten a taste of freedom and want more.

The combination of the inherent flexibility in RunMyJobs and our emphasis on collaborative automation adoption has made it possible to sustain this renewed excitement and high level of contribution from each team member.

Less stress and increased productivity

A natural consequence of greater contributions and feeling valued is less stress. In my personal estimation, my colleagues seem to be enjoying their jobs more. We have a hybrid work model, and this stable way of using automation tools has made them more productive and less frustrated. As we continue to receive excellent feedback, IT finds more and more ways to expand automations with RunMyJobs.

Efficient use of resources

Getting stuck in a rut isn’t uncommon, especially in business. People get used to how they do things and, even if they’re aware there might be a more efficient way, it’s not always clear how to streamline. The above steps and applications of automation systems directly solve operational inefficiency, and Newsday’s experience is strong evidence.

When we migrated to RunMyJobs four years ago, our IT team was about 10 strong. Due to market and internal changes, there are now three of us. Thanks to our robust automation solution, we aren’t overwhelmed and we’ve reduced friction with other teams. Instead, we’re efficient and always finding smarter ways to approach process automation. 

Moving into the future with Redwood Software

I see the purpose of my technical role as serving all the people who keep Newsday running. In that light, when I evaluate and implement automation technologies, I consider whether they’ll be in everyone’s best interest, not just IT’s. 

I’ve learned that this aligns with Redwood’s mission to unleash human potential. Redwood’s solutions enable automation design for all people, and it shows in the flexibility and scalability of its workload automation software.

Our team is currently in a phase of reconsolidating tools, with RunMyJobs at the center of our automation roadmap. I’m enthusiastic about how much more efficient and seamless our work can be as we continue collaborating with such a strong software foundation. 

Explore what automation adoption could look like for your organization: Get a quick demo of RunMyJobs.

Handling billing and compliance operations as efficiently and accurately as possible has led many utility companies around the world to implement RunMyJobs by Redwood. The workload automation (WLA) platform enables connection and coordination across every process and enterprise application, resulting in faster response time and mitigating risks in invoicing, billing, payment and debt management. Offering an end-to-end solution, RunMyJobs handles industry-specific processes like meter-to-cash, automating from meter reading to invoice delivery, making it the go-to automation solution for utilities. 

Read how three utility companies improved efficiencies and saw results using RunMyJobs.

Anglian Water

Background

Anglian Water is a U.K.-based utility with 5,000 employees and more than 6 million customers. With a daily billing workload of 16,000 invoices, Anglian Water faced billing operational issues resulting in customer complaints and an overloaded support hotline. The company needed to normalize its billing to address these issues, as well as improve cash flow.

Why Redwood? 

Anglian Water initially attempted to solve its billing process problems with additional manual intervention and employee hours. They realized they needed help and found cloud-based RunMyJobs workload automation to automate and streamline billing operations. RunMyJobs offered Anglian Water the ability to monitor, visualize and orchestrate processes across hybrid environments.

Results

With RunMyJobs, Anglian Water improved customer service by automating billing processes, eliminated billing errors and significantly reduced customer support calls. The company earned a number one ranking in Ofwat’s water regulator service incentive mechanism (SIM) program, with an overall score of 90 out of 100, beating the industry average of 84.4. SIM recognizes companies for efficiently managing their accounts, making bill payments easy and resolving operational problems quickly. RunMyJobs also enabled Anglian Water to streamline cash flow. Read more.

FortisBC

Background

FortisBC is Canada’s largest public utility company, with more than 2,400 employees and 1.2 million customers. FortisBC wanted to improve billing accuracy and the customer experience. With more than 50,000 bills sent out each day, Fortis needed to provide accurate, consistent billing, coordinated data collection and integrated data sources. The company also wanted to bring customer service and billing back in-house, which would require a robust automation solution.

Why Redwood?

FortisBC selected RunMyJobs by Redwood because of its powerful SaaS-based solution that could connect across systems and applications to secure all the data integrations involved in the billing process. The company implemented RunMyJobs in a successful, on-time migration involving innumerable applications and interfaces.

Results

Since launching RunMyJobs, FortisBC has not missed a single billing deadline and has produced 100% accuracy in its 50,000 bills. The company’s phenomenal record has furthered its goal of exponentially improving customer experience through faster, better and more cost-effective billing operations. Read more.

SWM

Background

Stadtwerke München (SWM), one of Germany’s largest municipal utilities with more than 10,000 employees, provides electricity, natural gas, district heating and cooling and drinking water to Munich residents, as well as supplying urban mobility solutions, telecommunications services and swimming pool oversight. SWM faced massive amounts of customer data and activities that had become a resource drain, as well as a growing range of services and a desire to increase sustainability. Because their existing platform did not support SAP IS-U, the service team has to manually start 60–70 billing processes daily, leading to delays, as well as erroneous invoices being sent to customers. The company recognized the need for a better automation solution to streamline its business processes, especially meter-to-cash, which involves everything from reading meters and maintaining data to preparing and sending out invoices — each process requiring more than an hour of manual work. SWM sought an improved customer service experience through automation.

Why Redwood?

With its sophisticated SAP environment, SWM wanted an automation platform that had deep SAP expertise. The company needed a solution with a proven ability to handle its diverse enterprise applications and data sources and process huge amounts of data from energy plants, wind parks, consumer meters and other systems for meter-to-cash reporting and billing. SWM chose RunMyJobs because of its SAP experience and track record.

RunMyJobs would interface between ERP systems and financial data sources to make all required data readily and reliably available on a daily basis. RunMyJobs could provide the control and access SWM required and a view into the detail of which meter-to-cash processes are executed, when and how. SWM could more easily adhere to the proper meter-to-cash sequence, decreasing process errors and instituting automated recovery routines should any error occur — enabling immediate intervention by SWM IT teams. And Redwood made it easy to migrate with not only an efficient, three-step migration process but also specialized tooling for migrating from Control-M, SWM’s existing platform.

Results

After a smooth and successful migration to RunMyJobs, SWM now has all of its customer data available at once, speeding up its customer response time and ability to provide customers with expert advice. The platform enables end-to-end automation of SWM’s meter-to-cash process across SAP IS-U and Business Warehouse to ensure 100% accurate invoicing on a daily basis. RunMyJobs’ self-recovery functionality and flexible scheduling of run times reduced meter-to-cash processing time from 14 hours to 8 hours.

With the messy, multi-step activities simplified into a predictable, manageable automated process, SWM focused on its “Next Best Activity” project, a continued effort to optimize customer service even further. Orchestrating end-to-end daily data flows from more than 25 different sources into a central database to then run recommendation algorithms prepares the next best activity for all call center team members. SWM has now implemented RunMyJobs across its organization, including mobility solutions, mobile ticketing and parking. Read more.

Why utility companies should se RunMyJobs

With RunMyJobs, your IT team can automate utility business processes like meter-to-cash, streamlining business operations and orchestrating processes across business applications and environments. Redwood can elevate your efficiency, accuracy and productivity, resulting in cost-savings, time-savings and a better customer experience. Book a demo today.

Insurance workflow automation optimizes these processes using specialized software to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as claims processing, application review, policy administration and customer service.

This article explores what insurance workflow automation software is and how it works.

What is insurance workflow automation?

Insurance workflow automation refers to the use of workflow management software to automate and streamline various processes and tasks within the insurance industry across various insurance products.

The software enables insurance companies to define rules and conditions for each task, automatically assigning them to the appropriate individuals or teams. It also facilitates the integration of various systems, eliminating the need for manual data entry and enabling real-time information exchange.

Insurance process automation software can generate reports, send notifications and provide insights into the progress and status of ongoing processes.

For example, when someone submits a claim to a company, the automated workflow software automatically triggers a series of tasks, such as claim assessment, verification and approval. The software integrates with relevant systems, retrieves customer information and generates reports.

The goal is efficiency. With workflow automation software, organizations can deliver a superior customer experience.

What are common use cases for insurance workflow automation software?

According to research by McKinsey, 50% of all work can be automated. For insurance companies, some tasks companies can automate are:

1. Claims processing: Automating tasks such as insurance claim submission, assessment, verification and approval
2. Application processing: Streamlining the processing of insurance applications by automating tasks like application review, verification of applicant information, compliance checks and renewal notices
3. Customer service and new business acquisition: Automating customer data for policyholders across the customer journey, including insurance sales, follow-ups, policy updates, customer onboarding and other touchpoints
4. Underwriting: Optimizing the workflow for contract generation, amendment and adaptation based on individual customer profiles, medical history and insurance history
5. Policy administration: Automating back-office operations such as onboarding/offboarding processes, compliance and auditing, billing and maintaining customer databases for efficient policy administration
6. Quote processing: Streamlining the generation of insurance pricing quotes, scheduling health assessments, handling document management and electronic signatures
7. Compliance management: Automating regulatory compliance processes, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures
8. Reporting and analytics: Automating the generation and distribution of reports, providing real-time visibility into key performance indicators, data analysis, decision-making support, data collection and data management
9. Document management: Digitizing and automating document handling, including document storage, retrieval, version control and collaboration

What is insurance workflow automation software?

In the era of swift digital transformation, 41% of consumers say they’re likely or more likely to switch insurance providers due to a lack of digital capabilities. So, if your company is still relying on legacy systems, here’s your sign to upgrade.

Insurance workflow automation helps insurance companies adapt to the digital world by automating repetitive tasks through automation software.

Redwood offers a range of automation software and services to automate business processes, enhance productivity and reduce manual workloads. Redwood’s automation solutions work for various industries, including finance, logistics and manufacturing.

How to automate insurance workflows with Redwood

Workflow management and automation software like Redwood seamlessly integrate with other systems, eliminating the need to jump from application to application.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Perform a process assessment

Identify the business processes within your insurance operations that are manual, repetitive and time-consuming, and evaluate their potential for automation.

Here are some steps to perform this assessment:

1. Make a list of all the key processes involved in your insurance operations, like claims processing, underwriting, policy administration, customer service, renewals and more.
2. Collect relevant data about each process, such as process duration, frequency, number of steps and resources involved. This will help you identify processes that are highly manual and time-consuming.
3. Engage with employees and stakeholders involved in each process to understand the pain points, inefficiencies and bottlenecks they encounter. Document their feedback and observations.
4. Assess the complexity of each process, considering factors like the number of decision points, dependencies on external data sources or systems and regulatory compliance requirements. Complex processes are often good candidates for automation.
5. Rank the identified processes based on their potential impact, feasibility and alignment with your business goals. Consider factors such as cost reduction, error reduction, customer experience improvement and time savings.
6. Create a comprehensive report summarizing the process assessment, including the identified processes, pain points, potential for automation and prioritization rationale.

Performing a process assessment sets the foundation for automating your insurance workflows.

Step 2: Design your workflow

With RunMyJobs by Redwood, you can design your workflow using its low-code automation technology.

Here’s how you can use its features to design your workflow:

1. RunMyJobs by Redwood provides a user-friendly, low-code, drag-and-drop workflow designer. You can easily create and customize workflows by selecting and arranging process steps, sequences, calendars and more.
2. You can also set up trigger execution automatically based on various events such as detected source files, data, events or messages from apps, systems, AI and more.
3. Redwood offers an extensive library of ready-to-use process automation templates, wizards and over 25 scripting languages and interfaces.

With Redwood, you can orchestrate processes and systems through context-aware logic. This means you can define rules and conditions within your workflows to automate exception handling and enable hands-free self-recovery.

Should any issues arise, the Redwood support team can help you set up your workflows.

Step 3: Integrate your existing workflows

Integrate the automation software with your existing apps and systems, such as CRM, claims management, databases, APIs or policy administration systems, to enable seamless data exchange and process automation across different platforms.

Step 4: Test your workflows

Thoroughly test the automated workflows and ensure that they function as expected, meet your business requirements and comply with industry regulations. Once tested and validated, deploy the automation solution into your production environment.

If any issues arise, RunMyJobs provides monitoring and analytics capabilities, as well as 24/7 support, to help you gain insights into process efficiency, identify bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions for further optimization.

Still not sure if Redwood can help automate repetitive tasks for your insurance company? Book a demo to find out more.

An example of insurance workflow automation success

Allianz and Redwood

Insurance provider Allianz, a global leader in the financial services industry, faced the challenge of reducing the effort and cost associated with their record-to-report (R2R) processes while improving data quality and eliminating trade processing delays.

By implementing Redwood Finance Automation, Allianz achieved significant results.

They:

• Reduced manual effort by 80%.
• Achieved an 11-month return on investment (ROI).
• Improved quality, consistency, turnaround times and transparency.

Redwood automated 90% of manual tasks, decreased the number of manual steps by 75% and cut the time and labor required to close by 65%. Employee satisfaction also improved as automation freed them to focus on higher-value activities. Read more about how Redwood helped Allianz achieve success.

Automate your workflow today

With the increasing digitalization of the insurance industry and evolving customer expectations, embracing workflow automation has become a necessity for staying competitive and driving growth.

Insurance workflow automation is a transformative solution that empowers insurance companies to optimize their operations, enhance efficiency and deliver superior customer experiences.

Learn more about how Redwood can help automate your business processes today.

As we move further into the digital age, IT leaders are becoming more focused on automating business processes that allow their companies to operate seamlessly end-to-end. In this blog, we will explore the six trends that IT leaders have deemed essential for 2023.

1. The pace of automation continues to accelerate. According to HFS, 70% of executives say that automation has increased priority, even post-pandemic. Over 50% plan to invest in I&O automation within the next 12 months, according to Gartner. EMA reports that 87% of organizations have significantly increased the number of processes automated within the last two years.
   
2. Orchestration is key. According to Forrester, 83% of respondents want to drive end-to-end automation. Gartner reports that 17% ranked Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms as the first-priority investment. EMA reports that 92% believe that workload automation should be expanded to orchestrate automation across the enterprise.
   
3. Timeliness of data becomes more valuable. Digital business requires teams, inside and outside of IT, to embrace the real-time, event-driven orchestration of business services, according to Gartner.
   
4. Automation enables better agility and reliability. During COVID-19, the more automated organizations adapted more quickly and effectively, according to Forrester. 80% use automation to drive process standardization and optimization, according to Forrester.
   
5. Increasing strategic role of automation. Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms are “force multipliers” to maximize returns on ITSM, SaaS, and CMDB, according to Gartner. Forrester reports that 77% automate for strategic reasons, and EMA reports that 36% have become very creative in the use and adoption of automation compared to “old school” or status quo approaches.
   
6. More automation based on low-code/no-code platforms. EMA reports that significantly less code will have to be written and tested for new automation projects.
   

At Redwood, we are the leader in automation and provide the first full-stack automation platform, bridging applications and infrastructure, enabling business and IT teams to achieve end-to-end process outcomes. Full-stack automation is required to deliver on advanced requirements, and Redwood is the industry leader in full-stack automation. 

Our platform includes advanced requirements, such as full-stack automation that achieves end-to-end business process outcomes, a SaaS platform with guaranteed performance and availability, deep and broad support of major application portfolios, low-code visual process design, wizards and reusable automation components, auto-recovery for mission-critical automation, and monitor, predict and manage SLA achievement.

Additionally, our platform includes basic requirements, such as automating and orchestrating core IT processes, time and event-based scheduling, standard connectivity and monitoring and basic workflow management.

Let’s take a look at some of the business impacts from our case studies:

1. Grainger: The company had a time-consuming order process with suppliers, leading to errors and inconsistencies in the order-to-cash cycle. This caused customer orders to be delayed, inventory and forecasts to be inaccurate, and sales revenue to not be booked. By automating the order-to-cash process and integrating suppliers with in-house ordering and fulfillment, Grainger was able to reduce its order-to-cash cycle by six times and operating costs by 20%.
   
2. Ryder: The company faced a similar challenge of a time-consuming order process with suppliers and errors in the order-to-cash cycle, resulting in delayed customer orders, inaccurate inventory and forecasts, and unbooked sales revenue. By orchestrating data ETL and BI flows, Ryder eliminated billing errors and manual processing and achieved on-time delivery up to 99%.

Ready to discover what full stack automation can do for your business? Request a personalized demo today!

With so many years spent in the automation field, I’ve interacted with quite a few customers along with our field team, who are so talented I’ve seen them bend the Redwood platform to a customer’s will. I’ve learned a lot through my time spent with these people, and I want to take this momentous opportunity to share some of the feedback we’ve received along the way about how Redwood has helped catapult businesses to the next level of efficiency and productivity.

Connectivity — Quantity matters, quality rules

Customers who have automated a breadth of processes across various business functions like procurement, supply chain, sales, finance and operations have realized significantly higher business value by reducing costs, gaining operational efficiency and providing better customer service. For this value to be realized, the automation platform needs to be able to connect to a plethora of applications in the enterprise landscape and to make it easy to execute business logic by talking to the applications in a friendly manner. ERP systems are particularly critical since they are the lifeblood of a company‘s operations. Some of the most customer-appreciated aspects of Redwood’s services include:

• Deep integration with ERPs (e.g., our SAP connector automatically selects the appropriate technology (from RFC to XBP to BAPIs to SOAP, etc.), so customers can focus on business logic rather than wasting time on figuring out technical details.
• Out-of-the-box connectors that make it easy to “point and connect” to an application, from public cloud services such as Azure Data Factory to SaaS applications such as ServiceNow to mainframe systems like z/OS.
• Support for a variety of scripting languages already familiar to IT teams used to build business logic and connect to applications, which empowers enterprises to leverage existing IT talent and not depend on augmenting with software engineering resources that may be harder to come by and need significant time to ramp up.

These functions outline how the ease and control with which you can utilize the functionality of your automation platform is paramount right alongside the depth and breadth of the integrations, connections and support it provides.

Composing automations — Simplicity and self-service

As our customers grow and need to scale their automation, a consistent theme we hear is the need for a quick and easy way to create automations. Business users know the process details and can be important stakeholders in initiating and even building parts of the automation. Embracing a more user-friendly approach results in wider adoption and deeper permeation of automation within a company’s overall operations.

Redwood’s low-code implementation and catalog of pre-built automations for quick deployment help simplify the process of creating automations. We also offer Redwood University, a learning platform with on-demand content and certification training for those seeking additional instruction.

There will always be complex automations that IT teams will need to create, but our customers have told us that architecting modular automations that allow reusability and, ultimately, self-service is the secret to scaling effectively. Recently, a customer even walked me through their automation roadmap that consisted of over 120 projects across various processes, functions and business units. There were more than 20 components that could maximize reusability due to overlap, which they keenly referred to as their “automation leverage!”

This proves that simplifying automation creation and enabling customers to leverage reusability and self-service functionality with their platform helps companies realize more value and obtain faster results.

Confident control — Maintaining oversight and operating at scale

The first step in reaping the benefits of automation is ensuring that your automated processes are running smoothly. Our customers tell us that every failed automation equals extra work that takes time away from other, often more critical, tasks. They want rock-solid stability with features that make it easy to proactively predict and identify anomalies and alert them to any impending problems. For example, Redwood’s predictive SLA management feature will warn a customer if an automation is off-track. This level of oversight allows companies to maintain a predictive, well-oiled automation machine that keeps their businesses running without interruption on a daily basis.

Another requirement our customers have told us is necessary for automating their mission-critical processes is being able to operate at scale in order to handle transactions at volume. Some of our customers are running thousands of automated processes every minute! These can include everything from consumer orders flowing in during peak holiday season that need to be mapped to inventory and logistics systems in real-time to running supply chain impact scenarios for thousands of SKUs to account for weather condition changes. Whatever the business process, there will always be situations where the automation platform will be required to step up and perform reliably at high-scale volume.

With Redwood, customers can trust that our automation works at scale and allows for ramping up and settling back down as needed. This validation of operating at scale, along with the ability to maintain oversight over business processes, is what gives customers the confidence to know their automation is providing the service they need to achieve the results they desire.

More automations still to come

Redwood’s latest version of automation powerhouse RunMyJobs by Redwood includes a catalog service that ensures customers have immediate access to new integrations as they are developed and deployed without downtime or waiting for scheduled platform updates. This is a key example of how we listen to what our customers need and deliver results to support their operational efficiency.

Redwood is proud to have hit the milestone of 50 billion automations, and we couldn’t have done it without the valuable feedback from our customers and teams working with us along the way. We’ve learned a lot and will keep driving to continuously improve our solutions so that you have the best experience and gain the most value with our automation platform. Here’s to 50 billion more!

To learn more about Redwood and how full stack automation can drive growth for your business, get a demo here.

As a result, many enterprise IT teams now find themselves overseeing implementations of multiple automation tools, siloed in different departments. These complex environments can include everything from WLA (workload automation), MFT (managed file transfer), ETL (extract, transform, load) and RPA (robotic process automation). These environments also include legacy, on-prem systems and tools that perform critical, hard-to-migrate functions. 

Orchestrating these disparate systems to deliver true end-to-end process automation can be a challenge. Business processes are fragile and fragmented and troubleshooting typically involves multiple teams and hours of expensive investigative work.

Multiple WLAs caused multiple headaches

As Director of IS Development at GROWMARK, Brian Culhane found himself in this position. GROWMARK is a regional agricultural cooperative — a large, complex organization with many business units. While their IT environment had changed over time, it still included legacy systems and multiple automation tools. 

When GROWMARK initially migrated to SAP’s ERP, they initially chose not to add another WLA tool alongside it. This meant Brian’s team was limited to using SAP’s native task scheduler to run batch jobs. They also had to coordinate SAP processes with jobs that ran on-premises with their legacy scheduler, AutoSys. Orchestrating the two wasn’t easy.

The solution we had was to try and tackle it with scheduling. So you might have an SAP job that would run at three minutes past the hour, and then an AutoSys job that would pick up that output at 23 minutes past the hour. You just hoped everything lined up and everything worked.

Brian Culhane, GROWMARK

When the execution time and schedules for these manually-coordinated tasks lined up, jobs were able to run properly. However, the lack of integration between SAP’s scheduler and AutoSys caused troubleshooting issues. In the “least-worst” scenario, if an SAP job errored out, a subsequent AutoSys job would also error out and everyone could tell something was wrong. 

The issue occurred when jobs in SAP failed or ran long without erroring out, AutoSys would still run its job at the scheduled time, without the needed or correct output from the SAP job. When this happened, the AutoSys job would complete and report a success. Someone would have to notice that the job completed too fast or gave no results. Identifying and troubleshooting this type of failure and then setting the job to re-run, was a huge headache.

It was a lot of coordination for the on-call people. They had to go in and they had to look at logs, and look at how long stuff ran. It took a fair amount of effort, and it was separate teams. The SAP scheduling team and the Autosys scheduling team had a lot of communication back and forth. When something went wrong, you had multiple people responding to it.

The team needed an enterprise WLA solution to streamline their IT process while alerting the team of job failures. Brian’s team set a goal of getting all of their jobs into a single view so that just one person could troubleshoot when issues arose. They also wanted their jobs to coordinate with each other across multiple systems — and be aware of the status and success of those jobs. Later jobs would no longer run when an earlier job had failed or hadn’t yet completed.

Consolidation, clean up and cloud-native orchestration

After a long vendor selection process, they ultimately chose a cloud-based solution: RunMyJobs by Redwood. First, they migrated all their SAP processes into RunMyJobs so Brian’s team could get familiar with everything. Even though Redwood Software supports the automated migration of AutoSys jobs, GROWMARK chose a greenfield approach. By recreating each job in RunMyJobs one at a time, they could clean up and improve their processes — and take advantage of Redwood’s new orchestration capabilities.  

We took out about a third of the AutoSys jobs that we ended up not needing in Redwood. Either because we were consolidating jobs and one job would do what three jobs were doing in AutoSys, or because the job was just shoeshining and nobody was using the output of that job.

GROWMARK implemented RunMyJobs as part of a larger digital transformation initiative. Even though it was a long process to build consensus around a solution, Brian’s team was clear about their goals. They wanted a cloud-native platform that offered a single, consolidated view of their processes. Most importantly, they wanted a way to move beyond schedule-based automation. Redwood was able to deliver on all their needs, on the timeline they needed, ensuring Brian’s team was set up for success.

We invite you to learn more about GROWMARK’s transformation by watching the full on-demand webinar “WLA Consolidation Pays Off.” Brian was joined by Redwood team members for a deep dive into the challenges of managing multiple WLA tools, and the benefits of consolidation.

Register to watch the webinar now for free.

Undertaking an automation initiative for utilities starts with mapping out its unique processes, specifically around meter-to-cash. By optimizing automation of this end-to-end process, utilities can drive revenue generation, increase cash flow and lower operating costs. 

Optimization of this multi-step process must account for smart meters, as well as the new data streams they create. In addition, your plans must include legacy and cloud enterprise applications and containerized environments. 

Although this is a resource-intensive project, the ROI you’ll gain from these strategic investments to streamline meter-to-cash processes justifies the effort. Automating your meter-to-cash delivers multiple benefits, including upgrading billing and payment processes, minimizing billing errors, accelerating cash flow and enabling the business to boost profits through strategic purchasing. 

And these benefits trickle throughout the organization and improve customer service, providing key competitive differentiation in highly commoditized markets. From a personnel perspective, your team can now spend less time babysitting billing processes and more time on engaging, high-value projects.

For modern utility companies, successful digital transformation has never been more critical. Between rising consumer expectations, opportunities provided by technologies like IoT and cloud computing and the always-growing complexities of regulatory compliance, utilities must evolve their processes or lose business to competitors that do. 

Transformation is easier said than done. Utilities rely on refining meter-to-cash processes to drive revenue generation, increase cash flow and lower operating costs. But, those processes typically include hundreds of steps and systems. Smart meters remove some of the manual effort involved in meter-to-cash but also introduce new data streams that add to existing complexity. Add that data influx to the difficulties of integrating systems across legacy and cloud solutions and containerized environments, and it’s no surprise optimizing meter-to-cash processes continues to be a challenge. 

How RunMyJobs is transforming automation for utilities

Utilities looking to improve their workload automation have implemented RunMyJobs by Redwood to connect and coordinate every process across any enterprise application to mitigate risks in invoicing, billing, payment and debt management processes.

Redwood’s unique, cloud-native automation and orchestration platform replaces outdated or limited automation, often found in ERP systems or traditional RPA. RunMyJobs is a comprehensive solution designed to handle end-to-end processes like meter-to-cash that create a chain of ownership from the time a meter is read to when the invoice is delivered.

When using RunMyJobs, utilities gain a single horizontal process flow that runs across existing vertical integrations, eliminating cross-referencing of data across systems and manual calculations and reconciliations. Redwood also eliminates the costly impact of human errors while minimizing business disruption. It’s easy to successfully manage and execute processes without interruptions, ensuring that billing is delivered consistently and accurately.

Modern utilities can expand automation beyond meter-to-cash

By implementing a comprehensive, cloud-based workload automation solution, utilities can take their automation beyond meter-to-cash. RunMyJobs empowers utilities to streamline business operations, monitor and visualize processes and orchestrate processes across hybrid environments. 

With Redwood, utility companies can seamlessly coordinate and integrate legacy operations, data, OS activity and web API interactions to integrate with any system, application and technology.

Leading utilities streamline billing and improve customer service

Redwood works with some of the largest utilities around the world to automate their meter-to-cash process and improve their customer experience. 

FortisBC, Canada’s largest public utility company, depends on Redwood to consistently deliver accurate bills to its millions of customers. With Redwood, FortisBC reconciled 65+ internal and external interfaces into a single enterprise solution, connecting and managing information flow end to end. The very first day RunMyJobs went live at FortisBC, they produced 50,000 bills, each accurate and sent out on time. Learn more about how Redwood worked with FortisBC to improve its billing and customer experience in this case study.

Anglian Water, a United Kingdom water service provider employing 5,000 people and producing 16,000 invoices every day, also turned to Redwood to modernize their meter-to-cash process. Before adopting Redwood, Anglian Water struggled with both monitoring issues in real time and attempts to mitigate the resulting operational errors — plus the high call center volume from unhappy customers.

Anglian Water selected RunMyJobs to solve these challenges, using the cloud-based solution to connect their processes and provide the visibility needed to improve operations. Redwood dashboards display real-time status of every business process, providing alerts and notifications if something goes wrong. A predictive SLA notifies Anglian of any errors before deadlines are missed, so they can be resolved before service is impacted. Anglian Water is now ranked number one in a regional evaluation of water service providers, a significant competitive advantage that netted them a financial reward.

FortisBC and Anglian Water used RunMyJobs to optimize their revenue flow, turning invoices into cash more quickly, effectively and accurately. The results: greater cash flow, more market power and better customer service. Witness the power of workload automation with RunMyJobs: Book a demo.

Watch the video to hear Christophe MacGarry, global finance transformation director at Faurecia, explain how the company worked with Redwood to implement a global platform for finance automation. Faurecia is using that platform to support the transformation of its Global Business Shared Services (GBS) and improve SAP utilization across all of the countries in which it operates.

The overall goal was to implement end-to-end process automation to boost efficiency, drive down costs and strengthen internal controls and compliance. “Process optimization is really in the DNA of Faurecia,” says MacGarry.

According to MacGarry, the key is to focus on end-to-end process automation and standardization, not task automation.

“We really think that process standardization is a cornerstone of efficiency and quality,” he explains in the video. “We have many other processes to come, so for us, it is really the beginning of a journey.”

He adds that Redwood Software has been integral to achieving this because its single, central platform is the “best friend of the ERP.” As well as improving the efficiency of Faurecia’s ERP, the finance automation platform also eliminates non-value-added tasks and creates a clear audit trail for compliance.

Watch the video to find out how Faurecia automated 80% of key finance processes.

CSM Bakery Solutions was in just that position in April and put out an urgent RFP. The response wasn’t great. Most job scheduling and workload automation companies either didn’t respond at all or said they couldn’t help. That’s when Redwood Software stepped up with RunMyJobs by Redwood, our SaaS workload automation solution.

The background to the project is that CSM’s contract with its outsourcing and hosting partner was coming to an end. The global bakery solutions company needed to migrate a whole suite of 70 SAP systems to a partner-managed cloud, which included operating system and database changes.

As part of that move, CSM also needed to replace its central job scheduling, too. It was running Automic’s UC4, which had previously been licensed through its outsourcing partner.

The challenge was to move CSM’s SAP jobs to a new monitoring and scheduling tool for housekeeping jobs in just two weeks — all while running the main SAP migration project.

A key advantage to RunMyJobs is that it’s the only SaaS workload automation solution on the market. This meant CSM didn’t have to worry about provisioning hardware, installing and managing software or using resources it doesn’t have. This was critical to delivering this fast-paced workload automation migration project within the two-week timeframe.

Redwood’s experience in migrating customers from other job scheduling and workload automation tools also proved invaluable in providing CSM with confidence and a safe path to migration. Not only does Redwood bring a wealth of experience but many parts of the migration process itself are automated.

As a result, Redwood delivered on its promise and had CSM up and running in production in just 10 days and is now providing support and advice on opportunities for further improvement.

In a LinkedIn post, Danny McCarthy, senior manager, global integration and SAP technical services at CSM, praised Redwood’s response and support, saying: “The interaction, collaboration, continuous communication and support was immediate. And they delivered as promised. Not just that, but they continue to deliver, with training and further support and suggestions on improvements. So, thank you to Redwood for everything you have done to help us at CSM succeed.”

Our clients have many things to worry about, but they don’t need to waste any energy worrying about the service that automates their critical processes. We happy to take care of that.  Our commitment is more important now than it’s ever been.

Find out more about RunMyJobs® and find out if you qualify for a free trial here.

The company is the one of the world’s largest dairy companies, selling products in more than 100 countries, with 19,000 employees and revenue of over €10 billion.

In the video interview, Arla talks about reducing the time to close the books, the importance of having an overview of the month-end tasks and the challenges presented by the amount of close-related work, such as accruals and adjustments, that still has to be conducted outside of the ERP system.

Watch the video interview to find out what Arla said in response to these four key questions:

1. What aspects of the close concerns you the most and how comfortable are you with the tools available to you?
2. What is the proportion of work within the ERP versus outside of the ERP?
3. What are the challenges with the month-end close?
4. What is your experience with Redwood Software?

When Redwood started working with Arla Foods over three years ago, only half of its Level Three processes were harmonized, resulting in employees spending too much time validating and correcting errors in the close.

Arla wanted people to consistently perform the same activities in the process. This was especially true with time-consuming financial control activities, account reconciliations, intercompany accounts and month-end adjustments that were performed manually using Excel and checklists.

Redwood identified 124 tasks performed in Arla’s close, of which 121 could be automated — delivering 98% automation and a 40-50% reduction in effort. The discovery workshop suggested Arla could achieve 100% process and data quality harmonization. This reduced the time to achieve month-end close from 10 working days to seven. Now, 73% of the company’s account reconciliation is auto-certified with journal entry and intercompany fully automated. Arla is also able to close its production orders two days earlier. This has released substantial time to further improve quality and reduce the time to close.

Watch the Arla Foods video to find out more about its month-end challenges and how it tackled them with finance automation.

The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome, and security can’t be compromised at any point.

Untangling years of ad-hoc automation, scripts, processes and dependencies is already a daunting task; turning that process and institutional knowledge into new ways of working that take advantage of technology is quite another. The sheer perceived complexity of this task, combined with those other concerns, are why many businesses get caught between different technologies and workflows.

See Redwood Software’s WLA migration process

With more than 50,000 employees, and as the largest operator of hotels and restaurants in the United Kingdom, Whitbread’s 1.3-million business-critical file transfers had to continue without fail each month during the company’s transition to RunMyJobs by Redwood scheduling. In total, Whitbread’s workload was spread across more than 800 different servers.

“Our polling services gather information from each and every one of our hotels, restaurants and coffee shops every day… It’s a very complex spiderweb of processes and dependencies,” John Fitzsimmons, Technical Program Manager at Whitbread Group PLC, says.

Worried by the pitfalls of outdated automation technology, Whitbread chose to migrate to RunMyJobs solution using our simplified four-step process, which includes automatically converting 90% of existing scheduling tasks.

“Our organization has an exacting process for IT transformation that involves our design authority, service integration and security teams. It demands conformity to Whitbread PMO project delivery framework and governance procedures,” Fitzsimmons explains.

Despite the scale of the operation and exacting criteria, Whitbread’s full migration took less than five months from planning through to live deployment.

“Early in the project we built, tested and migrated 1,900 scheduled business jobs away from RemoteWare and AutoSys. We finished 11 phased and grouped migrations between May and October. Since then, we’ve run almost three million jobs without a single problem or issue with RunMyJobs… We finally have our single solution.”

With 25 years of experience, we know — and say frequently — that simplicity should be at the forefront of any scalable activity. With the RunMyJobs migration process, we lead by example. Don’t take our word for it though; instead, let’s leave you with Whitbread’s words:

“RunMyJobs changed a risky project into an opportunity for ongoing excellence.”

Now, that’s what we’re all about.

Try the world’s only cloud-based enterprise solution for job scheduling and process automation today. Get started now with a free trial of RunMyJobs scheduling. You’ll be able to use the service for 30 days with support and help from Redwood.

And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey.

Simplify the landscape

One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing. Consider Whitbread, a multinational organization with more than 50,000 employees that supports thousands of hotels and restaurants around the world.

The reality of keeping a day-to-day operation like this running involves a finely-tuned cycle of stock ordering, financial transactions, HR management and logistics — all delivered flawlessly to avoid it all coming to a grinding halt.

Before moving to RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling, Whitbread had a collection of technologies to support automation of many of these crucial tasks. At its core was SAP® RemoteWare — supported by DXC/Fujitsu — for managed file transfers, and CA Workload Automation AE (Autosys®) — supported by DXC — for scheduling jobs.

With over 20 years of IT evolution baked into the company, the key to the transformative automation project was replacing these two inflexible, outdated schedulers with a single, scalable solution without causing any downtime or outages.

Simplify the workload

With such vast complexity, the result was a plan that involved 11 phased and grouped migrations. Migrating 1,900 scheduled jobs away from RemoteWare and Autosys to RunMyJobs took just five months from planning to full completion. Since deployment, Whitbread now automates 1.3 million business-critical file transfers across 800 servers per month.

After the successful completion of the first main phase of the project, Whitbread continued to simplify its workload through further process and task changes — ultimately converting 8,000 jobs into just 100 with RunMyJobs, all now run in a more organized way and documented.

Achieving this huge reduction in the number of jobs was the result of increased process documentation visibility. Previously, many processes weren’t documented at all. Now, there’s a fully-visual interface that provides an overview of processes at a glance.

“On a single screen we can see the results of our enterprise outlets — all 800 of them. This view helps our support team see if there are network outages, and our managers see if there are problems with suppliers. We can easily rationalize our core, automated business processes across our different teams,” John Fitzsimmons, Technical Program Manager at Whitbread, said of the implementation.

Upgrading automation capabilities isn’t just about reducing costs and allowing more responsive business practices — with increased visibility the Whitbread team is now improving process coordination and efficiency across the entire enterprise. And that’s exactly what automation should do: Release people from repetitive tasks, so they can take on more strategic activities.

Sign up for our webinar with Chris Gardner, Senior Analyst, Forrester and John Fitzsimmons, Technical Program Manager, Whitbread, to learn more about how we set Whitbread on the road to automation success. May 28th between 4pm & 5pm CET

Try the world’s only enterprise cloud-based solution for job scheduling and process automation today. Get started now with a free trial of RunMyJobs. You’ll be able to use the service for 30 days and get support and help.