Data Automation

How Data and Automation can Assist with Sustainability

How Can Data and Automation Assist with Sustainability in Your Business

The entire world is facing the inevitable digital transformation, which has not just changed the daily lives of ordinary men but has also changed the overall look of business operations in different industries. Technological progress and the introduction of innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and automation are supporting company leaders to operate at better efficiency than ever before. They are capable of generating more revenue and delivering better services without any compromise. Hence making the globe a better place in the process. But the question is-How?

Why is sustainability a better method?

For many years, organizations of all sizes have acknowledged the intrinsic value of social, environmental, and governance (ESG) ambitions regarding customer retention and seamless operation at every step. Sustainability plans are smart business steps that can support company longevity and keep customers returning.

However, many company leaders acknowledge the importance of sustainable initiatives, but only one-fourth have embraced sustainability as part of their business model, as per the International Institute for Management Development (IMD).

To get the most excellent prospect for long-term business success, the Switzerland-based company stimulates executives and company policymakers to follow local laws and rules and take a more proactive direction to sustainability.

Data and automation technologies support by offering tools to established companies and startups to meet their sustainability goals.

Smashing barriers and executing green initiatives:

Ideally, an organization’s sustainable ambitions should be genuine and environmentally oriented instead of being focused on making profits.

Today’s tech-familiar consumers are using their spending power to support environmentally aware companies and are even willing to invest a few extra bucks in sustainable products and brands.

Future-focused companies maintain transparency by revealing their sustainability goals and ambitions and promoting customer feedback.

However, feedback would only be so effective if it has the capability to churn some sense from it, and automation can become a complete game-changer in this matter.

Automation software can support this by reducing data interpretation burdens, allowing companies to accelerate their green initiatives and save money along with time.

For instance, by using automation software, companies can swiftly and easily track energy use, the amount of waste produced each day, consumer habits, carbon footprint, and many other things in order to streamline operations. Based on the amount of data collected, it could take months for humans worker to organize and analyze the relevant information properly. Technology makes things much faster with greater accuracy.

Data-powered insights to disclose optimization:

When we talk about a company’s sustainability goals, waste minimization must be at the forefront of the conversation. For a valid reason-It’s challenging to know the exact numbers in industrial waste production. Waste generation is a significant global problem and is expected to grow with time.

In addition, solid waste management is indeed a wasteful process in its own way, causing approx 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere in 2016 alone, as per data shared by the World Bank.

Manufacturing may profit from the data-automation-sustainability interplay in a massively wasteful industry, beginning with conservative inventory management. Extra inventory can block the supply chain and landfills. Nevertheless, using data-based insights and intelligent automation, businesses can thrive in the balance between large and less stock, greatly reducing waste, emissions, and overall environmental impact.

Improved efficiency of operations:

Waste arrives in different ways, and many businesses are guilty of wasting time. The saying “time is money” gets into the process here-ineffective and inefficient operations and redundancies can heavily disrupt the day-to-day processes while wasting time and money of the company.

The good part is that automation can bridge some gaps, boosting the efficiency of processes at each and every level of the supply chain.

Human error leads to inefficiency and wastes the time and money of the company, and now company owners across industries are noticing this. Companies can now reduce workplace stress and monotonies through workflow automation. It allows employees to concentrate on meaningful work that boosts efficiency and makes fewer errors.

Companies ready to embrace and enforce workflow automation into their sustainability program should start small and know the operations wherein automation will provide them with the best result. The adoption will help achieve financial goals, environmental goals, or another plan altogether.

Measuring Weighing cost vs. benefit:

For small business owners, executing sustainability initiatives may appear more like a pipe dream than an achievable goal, as the technology implementation is costly. However, businesses that have already adopted technology to drive sustainability must hire skilled employees who can potentially use these resources and streamline operations for enhanced economic and environmental benefit.

As companies can utilize automation and data analytics to improve efficiency, alter energy use, reduce waste and otherwise support using sustainability, the expense of financing in automation is worth it. By empowering company leaders to see the big and better picture regarding carbon footprint, data and automation can support optimizing operations and enhance a company’s bottom line.

How does data preparation automation improve time to insights?

How does Data Preparation Automation Improve Time to Insights?

Today, most businesses depend on the data, and the data generated and consumed for the purpose are massive. It is an undeniable fact that with growing technology, the amount of data will keep on increasing in the coming years. It is assumed that by the end of this decade, the total amount of data will cross approximately 572 Zettabytes, which is almost ten times more than the amount of data present. Ultimately this will be a challenging task for an organization, as it will become hard to manage and organize data. Besides, this process of collecting meaningful data from the accumulated one becomes a time-consuming process.

One of the top challenges organizations face is obtaining real-time insights and staying ahead in the market from competitors and the resultant pressure to work faster together. 

We all know that doing everything manually has become an impossible task as it brings in many challenges. Therefore automation is the best option for organizations to earn valuable information and streamline the data transformation process. As per the data fabric trends report, it has been estimated that the data automation market size will extend up to $4.2 billion (€3.56 billion) in 2026.

Strategic data automation:

When people come across the concept of automation, there is a common misconception that automating business processes means replacing human resources with technology. It is essential to understand that automation does not take the place of humans in the workspace; instead, they ease their work by helping them complete tasks seamlessly and efficiently. No technology can replace human brains for doing any jobs. Though most of the repetitive and monotonous business processes can be automated, the basic need to implement business logic and rules to be used within the code is done manually.

Interpreting and making the right decision needs human intelligence for conducting various complex data analyses, and it can never be replaced.

Even after the availability of developers, the growing need for automation will fail to keep with the increasing amounts of data and gather expedient insights from it. Manual coding to execute the necessary logic into automation will be an arduous task when it has to be performed with a considerable amount of data in a given time. 

Exploring new ways for data preparation and business automation will help in obtaining insights promptly. Today, many data preparation tools are available in the market that provides trusted, current and time-based insights. These tools encrypt the available data and make it safe and secure.

Why do we need an automatic data transformation process?

Besides the need to automate repetitive and monotonous tasks and offer the organizations more time to work on the other complex data processing and analyzing, automation provides various other benefits. The list is as follows:

  • Manage data records – Automating data transformation methods empowers firms to organize new data set effectively. This will result in maintaining the comprehensive data sets and making them available whenever needed.
  • Concentrate on main priorities –  Business intelligence(BI) is just not meant to deliver timely and meaningful insights. They are assigned to work on innovative initiatives. Automation tasks provide them much time to work on business’ vital aspects.
  • Better decision making – Automation permits fast access to more comprehensive and detailed information. This enables management teams to create vital and speedy business decisions.
  • Cost-effective business processes –  Time management is an essential factor for any business.  Time is a critical factor in any industry. Automating the processes like data transformation and other data related tasks reduces the cost and resources consumption and ensures better results.

Ways to automate workflow

Employing of a built-in scheduler and third-party scheduler:

ELT (“extract, load, and transform”) products have a built-in scheduler. This ends the dependence on the third-party application or any other platform to launch the product. ELT tools also allow managing tasks centrally that making it easier to control and manage the tasks. 

Additionally, another benefit of using ELT tools is dependency management. Here a primary job can be used to start a second job. Dependency management allows an organization to categorize tasks and make management seamless. Many platforms enable performing APIs, and API calls can be scheduled in a specified way adopting the operating system’s built-in scheduler. Many third-party tools can perform ELT tasks. Employing these tools will offer functionalities to integrate with existing systems within the development environment. But, if one has to use third-party ELT tools, then additional charges have to be paid for services and resources used to execute a product.

Cloud service provider services:

Today, companies are switching to cloud technologies. It has been observed that  94% of enterprises have already adopted the cloud. In addition to storing and managing data, CSPs provides many other services that support automation. Like using messaging services to start a task. Any production tasks or custom tasks that hold messaging can listen to the upcoming messages in a job queue and start a job based on the content of the message. However, the general working concept remains the same. Some examples of messaging services are AWS SQS, Microsoft Azure Queue Storage. 

Furthermore, CSPs also offer serverless functions to aid with automation, and this serverless functionality can automatically activate the jobs. The benefit of using serverless functions is that the company only has to pay for service when it is in use. Google Cloud and AWS Lambda functions are some of the known examples of serverless cloud services.

Conclusion:

In the upcoming years, integrating processes with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, automation will become easy and efficient. This will help organizations prepare data and acquire more meaningful insights. But to embrace these technologies, organizations should be ready to accept and welcome the changes that accompany them while adopting these technologies.