Hitting a Milestone 50 Billion Automations: What We’ve Learned Along the Way

Redwood’s intelligent automation platform just hit a milestone in our journey to provide the best value with our service. We’ve now executed a collective 50 billion successful automations with our customers!

With so many years spent in the automation field, I’ve interacted with quite a few customers along with our field team, who are so talented I’ve seen them bend the Redwood platform to a customer’s will. I’ve learned a lot through my time spent with these people, and I want to take this momentous opportunity to share some of the feedback we’ve received along the way about how Redwood has helped catapult businesses to the next level of efficiency and productivity.

Connectivity – Quantity Matters, Quality Rules

Customers who have automated a breadth of processes across various business functions like procurement, supply chain, sales, finance and operations have realized significantly higher business value by reducing costs, gaining operational efficiency and providing better customer service. For this value to be realized, the automation platform needs to be able to connect to a plethora of applications in the enterprise landscape and to make it easy to execute business logic by talking to the applications in a friendly manner. ERP systems are particularly critical since they are the lifeblood of a company‘s operations. Some of the most customer-appreciated aspects of Redwood’s services include:

• Deep integration with ERPs (e.g., our SAP connector automatically selects the appropriate technology (from RFC to XBP to BAPIs to SOAP, etc.), so customers can focus on business logic rather than wasting time on figuring out technical details.
• Out-of-the-box connectors that make it easy to “point and connect” to an application, from public cloud services such as Azure Data Factory to SaaS applications such as ServiceNow to mainframe systems like z/OS.
• Support for a variety of scripting languages already familiar to IT teams used to build business logic and connect to applications, which empowers enterprises to leverage existing IT talent and not depend on augmenting with software engineering resources that may be harder to come by and need significant time to ramp up.

These functions outline how the ease and control with which you can utilize the functionality of your automation platform is paramount right alongside the depth and breadth of the integrations, connections and support it provides.

Composing Automations – Simplicity and Self-Service

As our customers grow and need to scale their automation, a consistent theme we hear is the need for a quick and easy way to create automations. Business users know the process details and can be important stakeholders in initiating and even building parts of the automation. Embracing a more user-friendly approach results in wider adoption and deeper permeation of automation within a company’s overall operations.

Redwood’s low-code implementation and catalog of pre-built automations for quick deployment help simplify the process of creating automations. We also offer Redwood University, a learning platform with on-demand content and certification training for those seeking additional instruction.

There will always be complex automations that IT teams will need to create, but our customers have told us that architecting modular automations that allow reusability and, ultimately, self-service are the secret to scaling effectively. Recently, a customer even walked me through their automation roadmap that consisted of over 120 projects across various processes, functions and business units. There were more than 20 components that could maximize reusability due to overlap, which they keenly referred to as their “automation leverage!”

This proves that simplifying automation creation and enabling customers to leverage reusability and self-service functionality with their platform helps companies realize more value and obtain faster results.

Confident Control – Maintaining Oversight and Operating at Scale

The first step in reaping the benefits of automation is ensuring that your automated processes are running smoothly. Our customers tell us that every failed automation equals extra work that takes time away from other, often more critical, tasks. They want rock-solid stability with features that make it easy to proactively predict and identify anomalies and alert them to any impending problems. For example, Redwood’s predictive SLA management feature will warn a customer if an automation is off-track. This level of oversight allows companies to maintain a predictive, well-oiled automation machine that keeps their businesses running without interruption on a daily basis.

Another requirement our customers have told us is necessary for automating their mission-critical processes is being able to operate at scale in order to handle transactions at volume. Some of our customers are running thousands of automated processes every minute! These can include everything from consumer orders flowing in during peak holiday season that need to be mapped to inventory and logistics systems in real-time to running supply chain impact scenarios for thousands of SKUs to account for weather condition changes. Whatever the business process, there will always be situations where the automation platform will be required to step up and perform reliably at high-scale volume.

With Redwood, customers can trust that our automation works at scale and allows for ramping up and settling back down as needed. This validation of operating at scale, along with the ability to maintain oversight over business processes, is what gives customers the confidence to know their automation is providing the service they need to achieve the results they desire.

More Automations Still to Come

Redwood’s latest version of automation powerhouse RunMyJobs includes a catalog service that ensures customers have immediate access to new integrations as they are developed and deployed, without downtime or waiting for scheduled platform updates. This is a key example of how we listen to what our customers need and deliver results to support their operational efficiency.

Redwood is proud to have hit the milestone of 50 billion automations, and we couldn’t have done it without the valuable feedback from our customers and teams working with us along the way. We’ve learned a lot and will keep driving to continuously improve our solutions so that you have the best experience and gain the most value with our automation platform. Here’s to 50 billion more!

To learn more about Redwood and how full stack automation can drive growth for your business, get a demo here.