Automation and Data Integrity: A Duo for Digital Transformation Success

Key Takeaways:

• Harness automation and data integrity unlock the full potential of your data, powering sustainable digital transformation and growth.
• Data and processes are deeply interconnected. Successful digital transformation requires you to optimize both so that they work together seamlessly.
• Simplify complex SAP® processes with automation solutions that drive efficiency, reduce costs, and empower your teams to act quickly.

Digital transformation is always evolving, and so are the strategies and solutions that you need to succeed in your initiatives. Transformation is an ongoing journey, after all, so the companies that thrive are those that use technology and data to drive innovation and efficiency.

Today, automation and data integrity are increasingly at the core of successful digital transformation. And this makes sense, given automation’s role in the data integrity journey at large. Together, they enable you to act quickly, make confident decisions, and stay ahead in an ever-changing marketplace.

Let’s explore more about the relationship between automation and data integrity, and how you can harness both for successful digital transformation.

The Foundation of Success: Data Strategy, Maintenance, and Improvement

Is your data ready to unlock new opportunities – or is it holding you back? Data integrity – data with maximum accuracy, consistency, and context, is what unlocks true trust in your data. And trusted data is your foundation for impactful decision-making. Here are three components you need to have in place:

• Data strategy: Aligning your data initiatives with business goals ensures every effort contributes to meaningful, transformative outcomes.
• Data input and maintenance: Automation plays a key role here by streamlining how data enters your systems. With automation you become more agile, thanks to the ability to gather high-quality data efficiently and maintain it over time – reducing errors and manual processes.
• Data improvement: Ensuring that your data is accurate, consistent, and contextualized is essential. Clean, reliable data empowers your business to avoid operational risks, make smarter decisions, and uncover new opportunities.

Together, these all contribute to data integrity. And automation helps you expedite digital transformation outcomes, including:

• agility to respond to business disruptions with ease
• speed to stay ahead in the dynamic marketplace and strengthen your competitiveness
• data integrity to make better, more confident and more timely decisions

Throughout your journey, one critical factor to keep in mind is the interdependence of process and data. Neglecting one can undermine the other – and can slow down or even damage your overall digital transformation. Let’s take a closer look at that relationship next.

The Interdependence of Process and Data: A Crucial Relationship

Data and processes are deeply intertwined. High-quality data alone isn’t enough if the processes that generate or manage it are flawed.

In fact, if you automate a faulty process without addressing the quality of the associated data, you’ll simply produce poor data faster. And similarly, if you focus only on data quality without addressing underlying processes, you’ll run into recurring issues that consume valuable time and resources.

This relationship is particularly important in SAP® environments, where data and processes must work together seamlessly at scale. To achieve true transformation, you need an aligned approach where both processes and data management evolve together.

That’s where low-code/no-code automation platforms come into play, enabling your business teams – particularly citizen developers – to design and optimize processes without deep technical expertise.

When your data and processes are aligned, you create a cycle of continuous improvement. Automation accelerates these improvements and delivers visibility into all of the steps and data involved.

Overcoming Complexities: A Primary Challenge for Businesses Today

Complexities across data, processes, and organizational structures, present major challenges for digital transformation efforts today. This complexity becomes especially apparent in your SAP® environments, where systems are interconnected and large datasets must be very carefully managed.

At a glance:

1. Data complexity: Material master data provides a strong example of data complexity. When you have thousands of records to maintain, each containing an average of around 300 data objects, manual processes that are inefficient and error-prone simply don’t cut it.
2. Process complexity: Multi-stakeholder workflows, spanning functions like procurement, manufacturing, and finance, add to the challenge. The more stakeholders, the more touchpoints where things can go wrong.
3. Organizational complexity: Different teams across regions and departments often have conflicting priorities, making collaboration difficult and adding friction to processes.

Without solutions that address these issues, you experience bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and lost opportunities.

Automation helps you untangle these complexities, making your data more accessible and your processes more seamless while ensuring data integrity throughout your organization.

Automation and Data Integrity: A Powerful Partnership

Automation can’t be overlooked on your path to data integrity – it ensures that all data entering your system is governed by the right processes, so that you’re creating high-quality, trusted data from the start.

The results?

• Fewer errors
• Enhanced time savings
• Reduced costs

Automation also enables you to leverage trusted data effectively. With reliable, consistent information that drives automated workflows in your SAP® environments, for example, automation ensures that customer records or product data are standardized and error-free, allowing processes to run smoothly across departments.

Together, automation and data integrity increase operational efficiency, speed up decision-making, and ensure that your business is working with high-quality, actionable data at every step.

Automation in Action: Real-World Impact and Success Stories

If you’re facing challenges with complexities in your SAP® landscape, automation can be a game-changer. The Precisely Automate platform offers three powerful solutions for both data and process automation, so you can simplify even your most intricate tasks:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

These automation solutions open the door to countless new benefits and opportunities for your business, including:

• agility and speed
• improved data quality
• flexibility and scalability
• process visibility
• more accurate reporting and forecasting
• support for hyperautomation initiatives

Need more inspiration? Precisely customers have reached new levels of efficiency across their most critical SAP^® processes using Precisely Automate. Here’s a look at the transformative power of automation:

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

What could your organization achieve with automation at this scale? With the right tools in place, these levels of efficiency and savings are within reach.

Stay Agile, Competitive, and Ready for Whatever Comes Next

Combining automation with data integrity unlocks the full potential of your data – and that’s more important than ever as the rapid pace of change in our business landscape shows no signs of slowing down.

Automation drives speed, efficiency, and scalability, while data integrity ensures that the information guiding your decisions is accurate, consistent, and contextualized.

It’s time to build a solid foundation for ongoing transformation, where your data and processes work together to power innovation and growth. Find out more in our eBook: Powering Digital Transformation with Automation and Data Integrity.