Navigating the storm — Accelerate your business continuity plans with robust automation

Priorities are changing, and automating critical business processes is more important than ever

Putting contingencies in place for situations like the current one hasn't been tested until now, and a lot of organizations are finding gaps. What we were thinking of as disaster recovery scenarios have morphed into something else. Disasters were typically local, impacting one specific city or small region. That's what most organizations planned for. No one was expecting to have so many employees work from home at the same time on a global scale. It turns out it was easier to plan for data center failure than to plan for needing an impromptu cloud infrastructure to service your entire organization.

Every challenge has a solution.

Four ways automation can help your organization right now:

• Transfer, store, and utilize institutional knowledge of business processes
• Transform tedious manual business processes into efficient, error-free workflows
• Orchestrate the integration of your enterprise applications on-prem and in the cloud
• Empower non-IT employees to execute complicated workflows with on-demand automation

Institutional knowledge: a blessing and a risk

People are the most valuable asset for almost any company. The skills, experience, and knowledge they possess are what make an organization successful. Two challenges come with it, though: it's not easy to scale, and it's lost when an employee leaves or is unavailable for any significant length of time.

Your people are always going to be indispensable. What automation can do is augment them by capturing all that institutional knowledge of best practices and business processes and turning it into automated workflows. Now you can share years of experience and experimentation with a workflow that you can roll out across your entire enterprise.

Read more about this in our step by step guide for turning business processes into automated workflows.

Manual processes are distracting and destroy productivity

Your people have a lot on their minds right now. It's time to start automating some of the more tedious, manually executed business processes they're responsible for. Interruptions kill productivity, and you likely have employees who are experiencing more of them in their new “office”.

Help them out by letting them focus on high-ROI tasks, rather than spending two hours putting together a report that an automated workflow could generate for them in less than two minutes. You want them to spend their time analyzing, not agonizing.

Want a list of some common "low-hanging fruit" we can help you automate pretty quickly? We have a guide for you here.

Enterprise Application Integration management should be easier

In less than a week, organizations around the globe went from having workforces centralized in offices, to having almost all personnel work remotely. IT teams are scrambling to put solutions in place, and even organizations that featured work from home capabilities are struggling to handle the technical demands of this new cloud-based employee environment.

Automating the orchestration of all the apps your internal and external clients interface with is essential to keeping your business running smoothly. Database management, automating service requests, and simplifying the processes your end-users need to complete tasks are all part and parcel of what you can accomplish with smart automation.

Our Director of Product Management, Ben Demaree, wrote a blog you should check out to take a deeper dive into this subject.

Empower your end-users with powerful on-demand automation

What if you could make the power of automation workflows available to end-users with the push of a button? It's not just possible; it's becoming a necessity.

End-users need to be far more technology literate and capable of using a variety of applications to do their jobs. Some tasks are more complicated than others, though, and it's much simpler to put a complicated business process into an automated workflow than it is to have an end-user learn how to do it.

You don't want to spend days training a user to do a complicated process that involves accessing and downloading data from multiple applications, putting it into a spreadsheet, etc. It's far more cost-effective to have them spend their time growing your business, rather than burning a lot of working hours on tasks you can easily automate.

We've got a helpful blog that details some of the challenges that clients have automated with our Self Service add-on.

"If you have to do something more than once, you should automate it." -Michael Taylor, CEO of SMA Technologies

SMA Technologies has an automation platform that will accelerate your ability to conquer these new challenges. We want to help you make life easier for your operators and end-users while adding incredible resilience to your IT infrastructure. We are seeing incredible efforts by people to help each other out in our communities. In this spirit, we’re waiving all installation fees on new contracts.

This is a limited time offer is available only to those new customers who purchase OpCon through May 30. Installation of OpCon in the environment is waived, services are delivered remotely. Customers are required to purchase a second week of implementation, customizing the OpCon instance to the customer's environment. Customers are also entitled to $0 basic training for the term of the contract, with no limits to participants attending. It is our commitment to ensure our customers are successful!