Why So Many Schedulers? And Why It Causes Headaches

In an ideal world, a single technological solution would provide the answer to all your needs. If it fulfils the fundamentals of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) too, then all the better. In reality though, businesses rarely operate in such a straightforward way.

Tools often duplicate some existing capabilities and omit other critical ones. But no one sets out with this goal.

What actually happens is that someone has a problem, so they find a solution – it’s not the neatest, cheapest or simplest solution, but it gets the job done. Over time, and across hundreds or thousands of employees, this ad-hoc approach leads to siloes of information and problem-solving. A mass of single-purpose tools and hacks.

In the case of automation, siloed operations mean disjointed, non-scalable solutions that don’t take advantage of the technology’s potential.

The same excuse is used: “But we have to use all these different automation solutions because of our legacy systems!”

We hear that a lot, and many organizations find themselves stuck in the middle of a migration between automation tools – choosing to sustain both, rather than commit the resources to fully transition.

And that’s OK. At least for a while.

After a point, though, as businesses grow and need more capabilities to meet the demand of enterprise-grade processes (credit-card processing, for example), this approach becomes unworkable. Process visibility across the business decreases and unnecessary expenses begin to rack up as more ‘islands of automation’ are created.

But at least that’s better than the inconvenience of a full migration though, right? Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread didn’t think so, and went ahead with an ambitious plan to integrate automation intelligently throughout the company, powered by RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling.

In this fast-changing sector of the technology industry, where automation solutions are bought and sold as part of larger mergers and there’s no guarantee that the new owner will continue to update and refresh the product, the need for a fully-formed automation solution with the flexibility to automate anything, anywhere will be increasingly important for businesses like Whitbread.

By replacing old scheduling tools like CA AutoSys and removing the need for specialized automation knowledge within the Whitbread group, nearly 10,000 processes were reduced down to just a few hundred. And more importantly than that, it’s a few hundred processes that all provide complete visibility across the business.

This approach allows businesses to take a proactive approach to scheduling, rather than a reactive one with the usual mixed bag of assorted tools that destroy productivity, cost time and money and leave you feeling like you’re playing catch-up.

Try the world’s only cloud-based enterprise solution for job scheduling and process automation today. Get started now with a free trial of RunMyJobs by Redwood scheduling. You’ll be able to use the service for 30 days with support and help from Redwood.