Your IT system was probably written to meet a fixed set of needs at a particular point in time. As you grew, your needs grew too. You redesigned your system to meet a new set of needs—and still more needs emerged. Inevitably, a gap grew (and grew) between business needs and system abilities. People filled the gap. As more people did more work, you got stuck with more complexity, more management, and more mistakes.

Sound familiar? If so, then adding automation can reduce your work burden and delivers speed, audit and accuracy improvements to support your changing business needs.

If you’re still unconvinced, here are three solid reasons why automation might be the way to go for you and your company:

1. You’re no longer using applications for their intended purpose. Excel was never meant to be a reporting database—but that doesn’t stop workers from using it that way. As a workaround, it might have seemed “cost-effective” years ago. But as time passes, Excel simply requires more and more manual intervention as you contend with increasingly complex processes, regulations, and technologies. Before you know it, cycle time increases, human error proliferates, and operational costs skyrocket.
2. You’re making more errors than you’d like and it’s costing you! As businesses increasingly move to web-based systems, they encounter many new ways to make mistakes—from simple errors in online forms to complex errors in data transfer or web data extraction. Meanwhile, margins continue to shrink in many industries while competition intensifies. You literally can’t afford to be making unforced errors. With automation, you can minimize human intervention, making it harder to make mistakes.
3. Repetitive administrative tasks are often unnecessary, inefficient, and bad for employee morale. By turning more employees’ attention away from administration and toward more strategically necessary tasks, you can cut operational costs, drive innovation, and keep your workforce happy.

Next up: Once you’ve decided to automate, which tasks are the best candidates for automation? We’ll offer a quick guide to help you figure that out.

Register for our webinar on ‘Identifying the right processes for automation’.

Hosted by Joy Gnanamony, our Services Director and Automation Expert.

Thursday, June 20, 2013, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM PDT.

 

Here’s a basic question you should ask any vendor: Do you use your own product? If not, why not?

At Automation Anywhere, we definitely “drink our own champagne”, so to speak – and we love it.

Here in the marketing department, I come across data-related tasks that should be familiar to any marketer. Many of those tasks – e.g., collating and analyzing mountains of information—can be very tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error.

Automation Anywhere changes all of that. The software integrates seamlessly with Excel, and it’s so easy to use. For example, I can automate the collection and creation of daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports, then send those reports to the concerned departments. That frees up my time to strategize, execute, and manage new marketing activities.

With Automation Anywhere, I can extract data from the web using string query commands. I can even find broken links on the website. All of those functions integrate smoothly into our third-party advertising tool for data transfer, migration, and reporting.

Best of all, we don’t need different tools to automate different tasks. Automation Anywhere does it all.

But don’t just take my word for it - see what our customers have to say. They have so many stories to tell, and I love hearing their feedback every day. So give us a try and let us know what you think. I have a feeling you’ll be very pleased.

You and your team members have heard about the Cloud. Some of you have already moved particular applications to it—possibly some critical applications. But has your company considered moving your ERP to the Cloud yet?

What does it mean to have your ERP in the Cloud, you ask? Simply put, it means that your ERP applications are hosted by your provider, eliminating the need for your IT group to purchase, install, configure, fix, and upgrade the usual software, server, and storage hardware that support your ERP. This has the potential to drastically reduce your total operational expenses.

For small and medium-sized businesses that are diving into ERP for the first time, the Cloud ERP solution is the right path. For larger enterprises, switching to a Cloud ERP solution can be a big step that perhaps involves re-architecting processes, rethinking security, and evaluating a whole new world of vendors. Still, the benefits of the Cloud can really pay off for these enterprises, and migrating to the new systems can yield massive returns in the long run—both financially and functionally. This migration is where you can use some help—with automation.

Whether you’re planning a new installation of a Cloud ERP solution or planning a migration project from an on-premise installation to the Cloud, you can use Automation Anywhere as a key tool in the implementation. Here’s what you can do:

• Map out new process flows with the Automation Anywhere Workflow Designer
• Migrate your data to the new Cloud ERP application using the latest technologies, such as Excel automation, Web Recorder, image recognition, and scheduler.
• Use connectors to legacy systems to integrate data you thought you could never move.

At the end of the day, your new Cloud ERP system will make you (and your boss) proud. Just as you thought years ago, it’s okay to have your head in the clouds.

The wave of the (near) future is becoming clearer: it’s all about the end user. Constantly improving business processes, information flow, and dashboards for the end user is becoming the focus of most organizations who are trying to optimize efficiencies. It’s important for companies to keep adjusting and readjusting their business processes to create a perpetually agile business.

SAP is making big strides in this area (see “Will SAP Make Companies More User-Centric?”). Their most recent software announcements have focused on making it easier for business stakeholders to make critical decisions with real-time information. They’ve begun offering their CRM application in its HANA cloud, as well as offering SAP Business Suite with its HANA in-memory database. HANA, by itself, is showing tremendous growth in today’s market (see “SAP CEO: We Could Have the Fastest Growing Software Product in the History of the World.”), though it’s still in its infancy (18 months in the market).

Rapidly growing companies are finding that they need key components for successful expansion, such as real-time information, access to business processes, and analytics.  This is where software process automation plays an integral part.

Automating processes with a package like Automation Anywhere is a natural fit because of its flexible streamlining and automation capabilities, easy modification of business processes, and documentation of processes.

Companies are really looking for easier ways to access their systems, make sense of the data, and quickly generate reports that enable key decision making. These decisions are becoming more granular and frequent—in some cases daily. Given this paradigm, you can see how critical the end user decision points have become. The major software vendors (SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc) are placing a greater focus on this aspect of their software stack. The Cloud has become the heavy lifter here as well, taking much of the burden off the IT departments. For this reason, this is a great time to be an end user of business processes, such as sales order fulfillment, financial reporting, or customer retention.

My observation is that process owners and end users of systems are often tied up in the IT of their process, instead of spending more time on the interpretation of information and decision making. Too many users tell me that they’re still manually entering data, fixing system problems, or tracking codes and disparate pieces of customer/order information. Over 80% of the customers I work with see this as a problem, and want more efficiency. The universe will naturally gravitate toward these end user goals, and now we’re beginning to see it.

Have a story to share? Are you seeing an increased focus on the end user? Send me an email. I’d like to hear your opinions and observations.

To read more about SAP and automation, click here or visit: http://www.automationanywhere.com/ERP/solutions/sapautomation.htm Read the rest of this entry »

Got Big Data? How about BI?

You’re probably aware that automation software can help your enterprise create better business intelligence processes, even in the face of Big Data. If you’re the lucky person tasked with solving some of those “What does all this data mean?” problems, you might be confused by the pervasive use of a multitude of terms that are tossed around like 12-ounce cans of Big Data.

Allow us to clarify some of these terms for you. You might find that these technologies can help you in ways you might not have considered…

Read full article

How are your SAP processes, really? Do they make your blood flow? Or boil? If you have processes that cause you pain, you might want to think about changing things up a bit.

Let’s take, for example, a process that involves creating hundreds of sales orders each day. How do you get the data into SAP? If you’re using BAPI calls to load the data, you might be on the right track, but not very automated. Hopefully, you’re not manually entering it (if so, please see my Blog Aug 2011).

Let’s get that data flowing!

Automate SAP BAPI processes
Automation software now makes it much easier to use BAPI calls for loading data into SAP. In fact, there are 3 different ways you can do it:

1. Schedule and run simplified SAP processes (or T-codes) using Automation Anywhere, which helps you avoid memorizing long BAPI names and all their parameters.
2. As part of a process, execute a BAPI as a single command with no programming. For example, using the Automation Anywhere BAPI Explorer to access 2000+ BAPIs removes a lot of tedious execution steps.
3. Execute sequences of functions or BAPIs using ABAP commands, either as a single command or as a user-defined sequence of get/set/invoke functionality.

Using the Automation Anywhere BAPI Explorer is like driving an automatic transmission after years of learning on a stick-shift—it’s just easier.  The user interface conveniently drives productivity for BAPI processes.

Of course, if you don’t want to use BAPI at all, you can automate your processes using the SAP front end (see my Blog Oct 2011).
Automation Anywhere makes each of these methods easy, like no other SAP solution can. Check it out—it’ll get your blood flowing.

It’s a new year. The aura of change is all around. I’ve noticed one thing this year—a desire for change. Change in outlook. Change in method. Change in process.

This last one really gets me thinking—2012 will be the year of process change, especially in the ERP world—especially in SAP. And in particular, SAP Financials and Controlling (FI/CO) processes.

Like so many, do you struggle each time the last day of the month rolls around? What’s the biggest cause of pain around that time? Every month, I hear at least 5 people tell me that they cannot do something because “we’re closing the month at work.” Sound familiar?

The month-end closing process is brutal for most, hideous for many, downright horrendous for some. That’s just not fair. Maybe if teams can stop the roundabout for a short time, they can see that a small investment in time can make lives easier in the long run.

Let’s take the example of SAP Financial closing processes. How are they at your company? Smooth? Efficient? Productive? Enjoyable? If not, is there someone who is designated as a process specialist to overhaul it? If not, get one. This person can change lives. Here is one scenario you might want to visualize for your company:

1. Let’s say we appoint a process improvement specialist for the monthly closing process. Call him “Ben”.
2. Ben watches the SAP monthly closing process for 2-3 intervals, taking copious notes and interviewing many participants in the heat of their pain.
3. Ben researches process improvement solutions, including automation software that can be used to lessen data entry and repetition in form filling, mouse clicking, and copy/pasting. Shameless plug: This is where Ben Googles Automation Anywhere.
4. Ben works with his team to streamline and remove unnecessary parts of the process, and builds an automation team (or works with IT) to implement the automation software.
5. After 4-6 months, the process is refined, and the team reviews how the process improvements have helped or hurt.
6. After 1 year, Ben is designated “Process Hero” and receives an award and a bonus for saving the SAP FI/CO team hundreds of hours and saving the company millions.

How’d Ben do this? The easy part was the software. It can do a lot of the data entry, reporting, emailing, consolidating, and data transfer for you. The hard part was getting people to change—for the better. But when they do, Ben becomes a hero. We all want more time in 2012, don’t we?

Just think of the possibilities. Think of Ben. Be the Ben.

At the beginning of 2011, analyst firm Gartner recommended to CIOs that they “should focus on at least one major business process and either make a huge overhaul… or get rid of it.”

Our experience is that a lot of CIOs listened.

As a result, Automation Anywhere has grown much, much stronger. Automation Anywhere remains a disruptive leader in the emerging Business Process Automation (BPA space,) which analysts size at $2 billion a year.

Automation Anywhere saw 55% growth in revenue in first half of the year alone compared to last year and added 14 new contracts with Fortune 100 companies, Yet Automation Anywhere’s largest customers still only account for 4% of total revenue. Our growth remains sustainable, broad and stable.

A few highlights of 2011 that make our entire staff and team proud:

• Launch of Automation Anywhere Enterprise 7.0: This Fall, we launched one of our most important new products, Automation Anywhere 7.0. It takes a big leap forward in helping enterprises efficiently create and distribute enterprise-wide automation processes to make ERP (enterprise resource planning), BPM (business process management), IPM (IT process management), and BI (business intelligence) solutions more efficient.

• Growing Partner Ecosystem: This was the year that some of the largest software companies recognized our momentum as we became an Oracle Silver Partner, a member of the SAP EcoHub, and an Intel Software Premier Elite partner. We are also very proud to be a Microsoft Gold Partner, which is reserved for the top 1% of Microsoft partners.

• Awards: We racked up more awards in 2011 including the prestigious Red Herring North American 100, the Windows IT Pro Community Choice Gold award and the Network Product Guide Best Product of 2011.

• Major Product Enhancements for Testing Anywhere: We didn’t rest on our laurels in 2011 – we continued to push our testing automation products forward. Among the most significant advancements included the release of a Java and Silverlight software testing platform with Testing Anywhere.

• Community: We’ve known from day one that we were offering automation tools that were powerful for a wide range of users. That trend continued in 2011, as we saw so many unique, unexpected uses of our product. We heard many of these first hand at our first user conference, held just outside New York City this Fall.

This was an exciting year for everyone involved with Automation Anywhere – and certainly we feel we are providing our clients unique and tremendous value. Gartner’s prediction and advice for 2011 – streamlining or getting rid of expensive processes – will remain true for years to come.

Mihir

The recent movie MoneyBall is an entertaining foray into the world of sports finance and team efficiency. It shows how the Oakland A’s and GM Billy Beane overachieved in a world where the past routine ruled the roost. In that world, if you change nothing, nothing will change. The uncommon results of overachieving only came after Mr. Beane implemented a mathematical, automated formula for drafting players, filling the gaps, and raising performance.

Your SAP team can do the same.

Let’s take, for example, the need for your team to move daily sales data that resides in Excel into SAP. Whether you’re using an SAP GUI or Web interface, automating the entry of new sales contacts, sales orders, and other information should be automated to increase the efficiency of your teams.

An SAP task might look something like this:
1. Log into SAP module.
2. Click on Account Management –> Contacts.
3. Click on Create New.
4. Copy Last Name field from Excel to Last Name field in SAP.
5. Copy First Name field from Excel to First Name field in SAP.
…Continue for all required fields.
6. Click Save.
7. Check for Error Messages.
8. Click Back to return to main menu.
9. Click on Log Off.

With today’s robust automation software, you can create a task in minutes that will copy data fields from cells in Excel directly to the corresponding fields in SAP. SAP error checking helps you identify problems with data constraints, business rules, and exceptions. You can schedule the tasks to run at convenient times, or run according trigger events. You can even package up the task to an EXE file and run it on multiple machines in parallel. Automation software solutions, such as Automation Anywhere, can increase your team’s productivity by more than 50%.

And here’s the real kicker—These tasks are reusable and customizable for other tasks you want to create. In fact, the more automation you create, the faster each automation project becomes—you might call it a MoneyBall that’s on a roll.

We, at Automation Anywhere are deeply saddened by the death of Steve Jobs. It feels like we lost someone very close to us. That is odd. It is not like we knew him personally. Heck, our software doesn’t even work on a Mac. Then why do we feel like we lost someone close to our hearts?

As we all talked, we realized, Steve wasn’t about the Mac or iPad, he represented the spirit of Silicon Valley. He had become to most of us a symbol of innovation. He epitomized how you can dream of changing the world and have the courage to do it. He gave us a thriving example of how technology can change lives. He inspired many of us that share this dream and with his loss there is a void that will not be filled. We will miss you Steve. Your inspiration and legacy will continue to live in all of us. Rest In Peace.

Automation Anywhere Team

If your company is like many others, it spends an enormous amount of time unloading and loading data into databases, ERP systems, and web forms. As we all know, the amount of data in the world is growing out of control—some predicting a growth of 50x by 2020.¹ With this data comes data movement, sharing, reporting and a host of other tasks to ensure data is converted into information and intelligence. How will your company deal with this explosion of data? In these uncertain economic times, will your business processes be agile enough to survive?

How you automate ERP will make a difference.

Companies are finding new ways to automate the movement of data. In fact, automation has become its own industry segment—the mid-tier expected to grow to $3+ billion.²

The number of automation technologies is exploding, and solution offerings are not all equal. For loading data into multiple target systems, including ERP, consider Automation Anywhere. You can move loads of data and integrate disparate systems with drag-and-drop ease, yet full functionality. This single solution can access data from any data source, including databases, GUI applications, web sites, legacy mainframe systems, and ERP applications. You can grab the data from the backend or the front end of any of these sources, but front end integration is becoming more popular, primarily because of security concerns with giving someone backend access.

Automation is being used every day in verticals like healthcare, government, and banking. For example, Automation Anywhere was used to do the heavy lifting for San Diego County when they needed to integrate their legacy system with their document management system.³ Mergers and acquisitions are also obvious examples where automation helps to integrate and synchronize piles of data within two companies.

Automating the data movement is easy with advanced automation technology. Just be sure that your process is well-defined; for example, let’s assume we want to integrate HR data that resides in a legacy application with your SAP financials, insert the combined data into a web application, and run a report. You might have a process that looks like:

1. Log into legacy HR system and SAP financials system.
2. Bring up employee records with the fields you need.
3. Copy 3 fields (name, ID number, phone number) from HR.
4. Insert this data into Excel spreadsheet.
5. Copy 3 fields (name, ID number, current wage) from financials.
6. Insert this data into the same Excel spreadsheet.
7. Continue for all employees.
8. Insert all spreadsheet data into new web application.
9. Convert spreadsheet to report and email to 5 managers.
10. Log out of both systems.

This entire process can be—and should be—automated. In particular, Step 8 can be completed in an automated, scheduled, and error-free manner. And, security is enhanced because you are not giving employees backend API access to the database.

Using automation software is ideal for mass data unloading/loading because it replaces an enormous amount of scripting and coding. By using drag-n-drop capabilities, you can focus more closely on the process itself, while still having the flexibility to customize as needed.  Using automation is simply a better way.

Find out more about how Automation Anywhere can help you load/unload data from Excel to SAP, Excel to Oracle, integrate applications, and run reports with a click of a mouse, making SAP even better and Oracle/PeopleSoft Applications even easier.

¹ ComputerWorld (Lucas Mearian June 28, 2011)

² Article: Data Center Post-“Business Process Automation Emerging As its Own Market

³ Case Study: San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency

We all know that ERP systems are implemented to tie enterprise information together and make business processes smoother. However, the reality is that making ERP applications talk to each other and perform as an integrated panacea for the company is an unrealized dream for most. ERP applications can be complex, cumbersome, and often times just downright expensive to implement and maintain.

But there is hope. Here are 5 ways in which ERP environments can benefit from automation technology like Automation Anywhere.

Turn the Rocky Road into a Cobblestone Path

The 5 ERP implementation challenges that IT staff should be thinking about automating include:

1. Initial deployment
2. Application integration
3. Day-to-day ERP tasks
4. Reporting and communications
5. Migration to new system releases

All these projects can be slowed to a standstill, hit with rising costs, or delayed from a painful technical restriction, resulting in a rocky project that might involve: construction of new business processes, time-consuming scripting, modification of legacy applications, and extra coordination and collaboration efforts.

Automating can significantly reduce the time, energy, cost, and employee turnover.

1. Make the Initial Deployment Less Costly

Many ERP deployments are scheduled and budgeted for months or years at a cost of millions of dollars. Too often, these figures balloon out of control because of technical snags and coordination problems. With automation, these projects can experience significant reductions in time and budget. Complex data movement issues turn into routine scheduling of automated tasks. Productivity gains can result in your more senior staff focusing on bigger-picture strategy. Everyone is happier.

2. Application X: Meet Application Y

Ah…to marry two or more ERP applications in a happy lovefest. How often do we arrive here without significant pain (and the feeling that divorce is the only solution)? Here, Automation Anywhere is capable of making the pain go away. Whether you are integrating applications from the same vendor or different vendors, the capabilities of integration are endless.

Take, for example, a business process that requires pulling data from SAP Financials, inserting it into a web portal, and then pulling and feeding the information into PeopleSoft. Wow. Using Automation Anywhere, this can happen relatively painlessly by extracting data from GUIs and inserting it into other application GUIs, Windows applications, or Web portals.

3. Ease the Daily Grind

Whereas data that rests inside ERP applications is not a problem, data that needs to be moved on a daily basis to other applications (such as a spreadsheet) can create scripting nightmares. Automate, and you’re great. The more of these daily tasks that you automate, the more productive and less error-prone your team will be. And life is just better when management needs the information….which brings me to my next point.

4. Reporting for the Masses

ERP reporting is pretty straightforward, you say? How about when those reports need to be merged, emailed, and filed in a certain organized manner? Forums abound with questions about how to generate reports and email them. Fortunately, automation can make sense of the reporting puzzle and help improve company communications and executive decision making.

5. When the New Just Became Old

ERP software is just like any other software—it gets updated and improved. That means we need to upgrade to new versions and releases, leading to changes in business processes and data design. It can also mean that more pain is involved. Front end automation can help in these migrations—both in data movement as well as sanity checks after the new system is up and running. In addition, workflow designs can be built with Automation Anywhere to model the processes before and after, and check the efficacy of the process flow.

In Summary

So, we know that automation software improves our ERP systems, and can improve our lives as IT professionals. It’s a good time to try new things with automation—the data in our world is increasing at amazing rates and customer-focused companies are increasingly trying to improve efficiencies with their ERP systems. ERP will be the next big beneficiary of advances in automation technology. Stay tuned ERP people…I wish you a smoother path.

Be sure to read more about how Automation Anywhere can make your Oracle Applications processes easier and your SAP processes more flexible.

Automation Anywhere has been recognized by many leading IT publications including Redmond Magazine and Windows IT Pro for our pioneering IT automation technologies. Which is why it was such a thrill for us to join hundreds of other software companies in a black tie event last week at the Interop Network Products Guide award ceremony in Las Vegas.

In front of a packed house, Automation Anywhere was a winner in the Hot Products category.

The peers and analysts who voted for us recognise how far IT automation has come. It was just in the past few years that automation tools became so much more powerful and much less expensive (we are often 1/10th the cost of broader automation solutions). The result is that business process automation (BPA) tools have become their own fast growing market.

Thanks again to Network Products Guide for a wonderful night and for the recognition of Automation Anywhere.

In the early 2000s, I managed the procurement and installation of a large, million dollar plus business process management (BPM) solution. BPM solutions are about understanding, documenting and refining business processes to better meet customer needs, thus improving business performance. Historically, business process automation (BPA) tools have been a subset, almost a feature, of much broader, expensive BPM solutions. BPAs automate business processes – reducing cost and improving performance.

Sound familiar?

BPM, BPA and BI solutions often strive toward the same goals but through different approaches. BPM and BPA focused on getting more out of business processes, while BI tries to get more out of the operational data that is generated by business processes.

Over the past few years, automation solutions, previously a subset of the BPM product suite, have expanded into their own stand-alone products. The automation tools have become much more capable and at same time much less expensive. This has profound impact on how BI professionals can view automation.

BI tools traditionally integrated with internal systems, generating reports analyzing history and day-to-day operational data. These reports lead to actionable intelligence.

When we talk to our customers who are business intelligence professionals in businesses ranging from small companies to Fortune 50 software companies – we hear 2 themes over and over again.

1) In today’s world, to make a decision you often need data from outside your organization. This can include competitive pricing, market trends or even compliance requirements.

2) The BI solutions available today do not access 100% of the data within their own organization, which can be spread out across many systems. BI tools are very good at getting 70% of necessary information, but often the other data is spread out in legacy computer systems, desktop applications, Excel files and PDF documents to name a few. The cost associated with pulling information from older computer systems is often cost prohibitive.

This leads to partial BI implementations that lack all the necessary data. Many companies try to overcome the data shortfall through large manual processes, which leads to higher BI costs and slower data collection times. If companies want to leverage their investment in BI tools, they need to make sure they are getting all required data from within their organizations as well as from outside sources.

Here are a few real world use cases where BI professionals are using automation tools to get better data:

• The BI group within a well known billion dollar software company automates the collection of pricing and competitive market info from literally millions of sources and compiles this data into the company’s own BI system.
• A $200 million a year international manufacturing conglomerate automates the extraction of account transaction statements from several banks and automatically integrates this information into Excel for reconciliation purposes.
• A $50 million a year energy producer extracts data daily from various web sites and transmits this time sensitive information to its BI system on an hourly basis.
• A $500 million a year diversified energy company extracts crude oil prices and oil futures from multiple web sites every day.

This is where the new generation of business automation tools come into play. Working in conjunction with existing BI systems, BPA solutions can inexpensively access all of the data, from external sources and within older enterprise systems, needed to make BI solutions as powerful as they can be.

Working with my team at Automation Anywhere has been tremendously, tremendously rewarding for me. We’ve all put in long hours building the most advanced and lowest cost automation software and automated testing software in the market today. It is with great pride that we see how the results continue to speak for themselves.

In 2010, we more than doubled our sales.

2011 promises to be even more exciting for us as we expand our products in new directions and work more closely with channel partners. When we first started Automation Anywhere, our vision was to offer automation software that cost 1/10th the price and took 1/10th the time of large of million dollar software packages. With results we’ve seen over past few years, it appears the market likes our approach.