Sit back and let your automations work for you

Scalability, reduced dependence on key employees, freeing up time and resources, best practice, continuous monitoring and operational reliability. These are some of the benefits of placing your automation initiative with competent experts – does that sound like something for you? Then read on here, where we explore the advantages of 'Automation as a Service'. A service that, in its simplicity, ensures you can sit back whilst your automations work for you.  

We have helped more than 130 clients with automations and have, in all modesty, gathered quite a bit of experience along the way. This is what we would like to share with you in this article. Here we focus on how 'Automation as a Service' solves some of the challenges typically experienced with automations and ensures the foundation for an automation initiative that creates stability, scalability and security for the business. 

In short, 'Automation as a Service' is about placing all or part of the automations with external experts. Depending on needs and the specific business case, you can choose 'Automation as a Service' for the entire automation initiative or just for individual business-critical processes. This means that a partner can manage development as well as maintenance and execution of your automations – and that has its advantages.

There are several advantages to using an external partner to manage your automations. You can read about the five greatest advantages we have experienced here: 

1. Reduce dependence 
One of the advantages of 'Automation as a Service' is that you are no longer dependent on key employees who can resign at short notice and thereby take the wind out of your automation initiative. Time and resources are freed up, as long induction periods, employee training and ongoing maintenance of existing automations are not handled by internal resources. In this way, you give the initiative a solid foundation for scaling, and you free up time to focus on the business and prepare new processes. This provides the opportunity to expand with more automations, and your employees can focus their expertise on the core business instead. 

2. Best practice ensures operational stability  
When development, operations and maintenance are placed with experts, you ensure development based on best practice. Thorough documentation is created, and maximum operational reliability for the automations is achieved. This means that the automations run stably and deliver output in a timely manner. At the same time, the automations are easier for new employees to take over if the initiative is later to be run internally, as all automations follow a uniform logic. Best practice also means that the right tools are chosen to automate each individual process, as it is rarely appropriate simply to automate with one tool. It is crucial always to take the process and the systems into consideration before you choose a tool. Overall, this means that you get stable automations that the business can rely on.  

3. Scalability and flexibility  
When the automation initiative is placed externally, you gain scalability and flexibility that provide the opportunity to adjust resource consumption according to need. By letting experts run the automations, you only pay for the processes that need to be operated, and your employees can use their time more efficiently in the business. This also means that you have the opportunity to develop more automations – even during periods of peak demand. Thus, momentum is maintained when the business is busy. This flexibility means that you can scale the automations up and down as needed and provides full transparency and control over the initiative's costs and impact.  

4. Monitoring and dedicated contact person 
There is always help available, precisely when it is needed. Your employees can continue their workflows without the automations creating bottlenecks in your processes. The automations will run more smoothly, and employees can work as efficiently as possible. With external help, logging is ensured for all activities, which not only ensures that data is under control, but also that you can react quickly if something unexpected happens. This means that errors are often fixed before your employees would be able to notice them. And if something does slip through, you have a dedicated contact person who can handle the situation.  

5. Focus on the business and processes
By using a partner to manage automation, time is freed up to focus on the core business. This is where your competencies are best applied – because no one knows your business better than you and your employees. This should be utilised, and it is best utilised by focusing on identifying automation potential at all levels of the business and preparing the processes to be automated.  

This article is written by Senior Manager Rasmus Fryd and focuses on how 'Automation as a Service' solves some of the challenges typically experienced with automation activities. And not least – ensures the foundation for an automation initiative that creates stability, scalability and security for the business.