Powering Digital Transformation with Automation and Data Integrity

For more than a decade, digital transformation has consistently topped the priority lists of organizations across sectors. That’s no surprise, given that it doesn’t truly have an end-state; successful companies will always be evolving and undertaking new digital transformation initiatives to keep pace with an ever-shifting environment.

Automation has a growing role to play in successful digital transformation, particularly regarding its impact on your business strategy and data integrity journey at large. When you trust your data, you love your data – thanks to all of the opportunities it unlocks. Trusted data is the foundation that empowers business leaders to make confident, impactful decisions.

But what does this journey look like? Here are three essential components to ensure you can trust and love your data:

Data strategy. A well-defined data strategy sets the stage for everything else. Whether it’s through using strategic services to develop an overarching plan, having clarity on your data’s role in your transformation initiative ensures you’re working toward the right business goals.
Data input and maintenance. Automation plays a critical role in how you gather and manage your data. Having a process that efficiently brings high quality data into the system of record and maintains it easily over time can make or break your business agility.
Data improvement. Improving the overall quality and integrity of your data is non-negotiable. With clean, reliable data, you’ll not only avoid operational issues but also create opportunities for deeper insights and smarter business decisions.

These elements help you gain data integrity – data with maximum accuracy, consistency, and context. And with automation in the mix, you will achieve your desired business outcomes of digital transformation even faster:

Be more agile to respond to business disruptions with ease
Go faster to stay ahead in the dynamic marketplace and strengthen your competitiveness
Improve data integrity to make better, more confident and more timely decisions

It’s time to harness the power of automation and data integrity for sustainable and scalable transformation. Let’s explore more about what that engagement looks like, challenges you may encounter along the way, and the solutions that help ensure your success. We’ll be placing special focus on SAP^® environments, but there are valuable takeaways ahead for everyone.

A Crucial Relationship: The Interdependence of Process and Data

We mentioned the idea of data love – so let’s begin by highlighting one important relationship that you can’t overlook as you approach any digital transformation effort: the close relationship between your data and your business processes.

These two elements are deeply interdependent, and neglecting either can result in setbacks with major downstream impacts.

For example, if you focus solely on improving data quality but ignore the processes that create and manage that data, you’re only solving half the problem. The result? Bad data generated even faster – and endless time spent fixing it.

Similarly, automating a process to optimize it for the speed and agility without considering the associated data simply amplifies those data quality issues.

This interdependence is particularly critical in your SAP^® environments, where data and processes need to work in harmony at scale. As automation becomes increasingly vital in digital transformation, low-code/no-code platforms are emerging as essential tools. They allow your business data steward teams – particularly citizen developers – to build and optimize processes quickly without extensive technical expertise.

By streamlining your processes and ensuring that they produce clean, accurate data, you create a cycle of continuous improvement. Automation not only accelerates these improvements but also provides visibility into the steps and data, ensuring that each component of your business works cohesively.

Complexity:
The Challenge of Modern Data Environments

One of the most significant challenges facing the management of SAP^® master data and processes today is complexity – across data, processes, and organizational structure. This multi-dimensional complexity makes it difficult to keep up with the demands of a rapidly evolving market.

Data complexity. Think about your material master data and its associated rules, for instance. When each record typically includes approximately 300 different data objects, manual management becomes very tedious, error prone, and inefficient – especially when doing so across thousands of records.
Process complexity. The processes and its associated rules you need to manage these records are just as complex, often involving numerous stakeholders across your organization. From procurement to manufacturing, finance, and customer service, each team plays a role in the lifecycle of the data. These human-in-the-loop processes create multiple touchpoints where things can go wrong.
Organizational complexity. Organizational complexity also plays a role. Different departments may have competing priorities and ways of using the data, making collaboration challenging. When you add in multiple regions, business units, and compliance needs, the complexity can feel insurmountable.

These challenges in your SAP^® environment – in addition to complexities within the data journey at large – can cause bottlenecks and cost your organization in more ways than one. But the good news is that the right automation solutions can help you overcome these obstacles, streamline your processes, and improve data integrity at every step of the way.

Similar to digital transformation itself, the data integrity journey is ongoing. Every organization’s needs are unique, and it’s not a simple linear process. Let’s explore that more next.

“53% of SAP® enterprises say the complexity of business processes is a top challenge when using process automation.”

Unlocking Automation in SAP®: 2025 Trends and Challenges report

The Data Integrity Journey

Tackling trust issues

Do you need to make better business decisions, but find that your data isn’t ready for the task? You’re not alone. In fact, 76% of organizations say data-driven decision-making is the top goal of their data programs, yet 67% don’t completely trust their data.

This distrust comes in many forms:

Access issues. Data might be trapped in legacy systems, making it unavailable when and where it’s needed.
Outdated information. Data may not be as fresh or current as business processes demand.
Lack of understanding. Those closest to the data often don’t fully grasp its real-world context, lineage, business rules or usage policies within the business.
Surface-level errors. Analysts and users can see inconsistencies and errors firsthand, but often lack visibility into their root causes – and therefore can’t resolve them in a timely and cost-efficient way.

These gaps in trust can have a cascading effect, leading to operational inefficiencies, lost opportunities, and reduced competitive edge.

The solution? Data integrity. At its core, data integrity ensures that your information is accurate, consistent, and contextualized – so that it’s fit for purpose and ready to drive your desired outcomes. With trusted data, you make faster, better, and more confident decisions for results your business will love.

The elements of data integrity success

Several interconnected areas are required to build trust in your data – and you can more easily build data integrity when the core capabilities you need are working together.

That’s why Precisely brings a complete set of differentiated capabilities to support your data initiatives now – and into the future. At a high level, our portfolio and data strategy services support every step along your data journey, so you can:

bring together data that your business generates from various systems, including complex IBM mainframe, IBM i, and SAP^®
catalog, cleanse, and validate your data with business rules enforcement so that your users can find, understand, trust, and leverage it responsibly downstream
ensure proper governance of your data and management of your master data
enrich your data with third-party datasets and spatial insights for deeper context and understanding
Activate your data for optimal decision-making and customer communication

All of this comes together in the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, which delivers market-leading capabilities as SaaS services – meeting your business wherever it may be on the path to trusted data.

And that flexibility is critical – because these days, your data may live on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid multi-cloud environment; you may be using transactional databases, mainframe, or mid-range systems. There’s such a wide variety of technologies that organizations use today to generate, manage, and improve data integrity, and you’ll gain a tremendous advantage if you’re able to do it all where your data actually lives.

The Data Integrity Foundation

As we discussed, this journey isn’t linear – different businesses will enter at different stages based on their own goals and challenges. The Data Integrity Suite services help you throughout the journey, standing on a foundation of fundamental building blocks that connect and accelerate them all. Here’s a snapshot of how you achieve more with this foundation:

Connect data assets and metadata – this is where many businesses will start. This tackles the trust issue of not being able to find what you need fast enough.
Understand data meaning and purpose
Cleanse data to achieve desired quality levels that keep your data accurate, consistent, and fit for purpose
Enrich data with third-party datasets and location-derived context for stronger analytics and decision-making
Govern data to meet standards for security and privacy, using a data catalog to ensure critical data can be easily found, understood, trusted, and leveraged
Observe data proactively to uncover anomalies and prevent costly downstream issues

The right tools make all the difference in simplifying your complex processes, increasing efficiency, and empowering your teams to make smarter decisions. Not to mention, there’s economic edge to be found with a converged solution like the Suite:

Reduced costs. A single solution with everything you need eliminate the need for multiple point solutions and associated licensing fees.
Future-proofing. Stay current with evolving technology and reap their benefits
Unified experience. Integrate data seamlessly across platforms for greater efficiency and business impact.

Every organization’s data journey is unique, but the goal remains the same: trusted data for better business outcomes.

Automation and Data Integrity

Automation is a key player in achieving and maintaining data integrity. By integrating automation into your data strategy, you not only improve data quality but also accelerate the processes that power your operations.

Both speed and accuracy are essential for success, and automation helps deliver on that while ensuring that your data stays reliable, consistent, and ready to take on new use cases.

**Automation: creating and leveraging trusted data**

Creating high-quality, trusted data begins with automating the front-end processes that generate it. For instance, in SAP^® environments, automation ensures that your master data, like customer or product information, is consistent, well-governed, and has integrity from the start. This helps prevent errors and discrepancies that can ripple through your systems, saving time and reducing the need for costly manual corrections.

But automation isn’t just about data creation – it also enables you to leverage trusted data effectively. For example, in manufacturing processes managed through SAP^® ERP systems, automated workflows can ensure that high-quality data drives efficiencies across departments

Precisely Automate: Enhancing Your SAP^® Landscape

How can you begin to approach automation? You’ll find all that you need within the Precisely Automate platform, offering comprehensive automation solutions designed to simplify complex, data-intensive SAP^® processes.

These solutions focus on both data automation and process automation, empowering your business users with the tools they need to operate efficiently, without extensive technical expertise.

The Precisely Automate platform offers three distinct products, each contributing to streamlined data management and optimized processes:

Automate Studio is the premier Excel-to-SAP^® automation solution. It allows your business users to create and manage SAP^® data directly from familiar Excel spreadsheets.
Automate Studio Manager enhances your Automate Studio capabilities by adding server-side functionality. With this tool, you gain greater control through easy two-step workflows, job execution tracking, and more robust license management.
Automate Evolve delivers the full suite of automation capabilities, including those of Automate Studio, plus two distinct flavors of process automation to tackle your complex data-intensive processes:
- Excel workflow efficiently moves data automation files through complex workflows
- Form and workflow provides role-based, business-friendly forms that ensure each participant is only focused on their assigned process tasks

The benefits of a complete automation platform

What does all of this mean for you? These automation capabilities deliver several key benefits:

Agility and speed. Automation allows your business to move faster by streamlining data processes, which enables you to rapidly respond to changing market conditions.
Improved data quality. With guardrails in place, automation ensures that data meets governance standards from the moment it enters your system.
Process visibility. Gain full visibility into your processes – knowing who touched what data, when, and where – for greater control and accountability.
Flexibility and scalability. With low-code/no code solutions, your business teams can more easily make an impact with the ability to deploy automation wherever it’s most needed in the business.
More accurate reporting and forecasting. With the higher-quality, trusted data that automation delivers, you gain more pinpoint accuracy and confidence with your reporting and forecasting.

Hyperautomation and citizen development

Another key Precisely Automate benefit to explore is its support for hyperautomation: the ability to automate as many processes across your enterprise as quickly as possible by leveraging a combination of tools, systems, and techniques.

Much of the success of hyperautomation depends on expanding automation beyond its traditional IT toolkit and embracing more citizen developers who can use a low-code/no-code platform, like Precisely Automate, to develop and implement process automation solutions from within business teams.

Through citizen development and hyperautomation at large, you’re able to better:

distribute automation initiatives across business teams, reducing the burden on IT departments
deploy automation quickly to adapt to evolving needs
increase operational scalability by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks

“58% of SAP® enterprises view citizen development as very important for expanding automation across their organizations.”

Unlocking Automation in SAP®: 2025 Trends and Challenges report

Automation in action: real-world successes

Precisely customers have reached new levels of efficiency across their most critical SAP^® processes using Precisely Automate. Here are a few examples of automation’s impact:

97% reduction in time to create customer records, cutting the process from 144 hours to just six.
90% reduction in material change processing time, resulting in savings of approximately $500,000 the first year
87% reduction in new vendor and materials qualification time, transforming a two-and-a-half-year process into just three months

Love Your Data and Fuel Transformation
with Automation and Data Integrity

As the pace of change accelerates, the pressure grows to build a strong foundation for ongoing digital transformation. This demands that your data and processes work together seamlessly, and that requires both automation and data integrity.

Automation serves as the engine that powers efficiency, speed, and scalability. It simplifies complex SAP^® processes, enables your business teams to act faster, and helps ensure data integrity from the moment a record is created. This enables you to unlock the full potential of your SAP^® data for reporting, analytics, artificial intelligence, and more.

Your data is meant to be loved – and when you embrace automation and data integrity together, you fuel the digital transformation that helps you write your data love story.

Looking for more inspiration? Get it directly from your peers with our eBook, Insights From SAP^® Master Data Professionals. You’ll learn about the benefits businesses are experiencing using our industry-leading SAP^® ERP automation and data management platforms – and, get even more tips to help you uncover your own wins in the area of materials master data.

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