Blog & Newsroom

3 reasons “low-code” automation is on the rise

When automating business processes for your organization, having software that is easy to implement and use will help you to get value faster. You want workload automation that allows everyone in IT to be productive quickly and to have enough confidence in the software to be able to focus on other work that adds more value. There is increasing adoption of “low-code” easy-to-use systems intended for non-technical people, or “citizen developers.” Modern workload automation solutions, like RunMyJobs by Redwood,

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Four areas where automation gives you business agility

Your organization needs to be agile. That means responding quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities, and developing business solutions to address them. Modern workload automation supports this business agility by enabling the business processes that make organizations more responsive to customers — both internal and external — and meet their increasing expectations around speed and reliability. There are four areas where automation can provide an important helping hand: Speed of innovationSaaS-based workload automation,

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The rise of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs)

Automation technology is ever-evolving. One of the latest developments in the world of enterprise automation is the growing importance of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). This isn’t simply another name for workload automation solutions (WLA solutions). Rather, Gartner® describes a SOAP as a workload automation platform designed for event-driven business models and cloud infrastructure. Infrastructure and operations leaders (I&O leaders) can use these advanced tools to drive customer-focused agility to support their cloud,

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Podcast: How to ensure accurate multi-level cost and revenue allocations in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at the challenges around cost and revenue allocation in SAP and how to tackle them. This area of finance impacts product pricing and profit margin. It includes the collection of all the multi-level direct and indirect costs that need to be allocated to a cost center and then calculating what portion of that total cost should be attributed to each product or service to be sold.

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Podcast: How to automate controls and validations in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at how to tackle some of the issues around controls and validations for finance processes in SAP. In the podcast, technology writer and editor Andy McCue talks to finance transformation expert Adrian Li, who has more than 20 years of experience designing, building and running SAP ERP in both large and small organizations and across many industry sectors. Topics covered include: What types of SAP controls and validations there are around finance and associated processes.

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Podcast: How to achieve touchless batch input processing in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at how to relieve some pain points for finance and IT around batch processing in SAP. And we discuss how automation can help tackle those problems. In the podcast, technology writer and editor Andy McCue talks to finance transformation expert Adrian Li, who has more than 20 years’ experience designing, building and running SAP ERP in both large and small organizations and across many industry sectors.

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Finance IT: How to manage dependencies within SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance automation podcasts, we discuss why it’s a challenge to manage finance process dependencies in SAP and ensure tasks are completed in the correct sequence. In the podcast, writer and editor Andy McCue talks to Adrian Li, a finance transformation expert with more than 20 years experience in the design, build and running of SAP ERP in both large and small organizations across many industry sectors. Li explains how the failure to manage dependencies within SAP can have a huge impact on finance processes such as asset depreciation and,

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The SAP® challenges for finance and IT

Writer and editor Andy McCue talks to Adrian Li, a finance transformation expert with more than 20 years experience in the design, build and running of SAP ERP in both large and small organizations across many industry sectors. In the podcast, Li explains how many of the IT  and automation challenges can be traced back to the original concept and design for SAP more than 40 years ago and how fundamental it is to finance processes in large organizations today.

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The automation gap: The 3 reasons why your finance processes are still highly manual

Despite the widespread adoption of ERP systems that were supposed to remove most of the manual effort, only 20% of finance processes are truly automated. Why is that? It’s the automation gap. That gap around finance and accounting processes means work still needs to be done manually outside of those ERP systems, requiring additional tools or extensive ERP customization. This results in a compromise — either accept a lower level of finance process automation and fill the gaps with manual work,

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How automotive parts supplier Faurecia automated 80% of key finance processes

How did leading global automotive parts supplier Faurecia — which has its equipment in one in three cars worldwide — automate 80% of its finance processes, with approval workflow the only remaining manual task? Watch the video to hear Christophe MacGarry, global finance transformation director at Faurecia, explain how the company worked with Redwood to implement a global platform for finance automation. Faurecia is using that platform to support the transformation of its Global Business Shared Services (GBS) and improve SAP utilization across all of the countries in which it operates.

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The CIO’s guide to finance automation and why it matters

What are the biggest challenges for CIOs today when it comes to meeting the needs of the modern finance function? The reality is that the current finance IT landscape of most large organizations is sub-optimal. It’s a costly and complex mix of ERP systems, workflow engines, point solutions and RPA tools — plus a lot of human effort on top to plug the gaps. According to APQC’s general accounting process framework, almost all key finance processes require additional work outside of the ERP.

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Automation lessons from the financial close front line

The often-frenetic activity of financial close processes is largely due to the huge amount of manual effort they entail every month or quarter. To reduce the pressure and risk this brings, there is an answer for finance departments: Use automation across the close. Done effectively, this can mean the financial close becomes a non-event. And it also allows finance staff to focus on essential analysis to provide essential insights that can improve broader business performance. In the recent “How to make the financial close a non-event”

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How to eliminate manual effort and stress and make your financial close a non-event

The financial close continues to weigh heavily on accounting organizations. A typical global close for a large organization today can involve over 100 companies that must be closed before group consolidation, with more than 500 processes per company plus many more sub-processes and hundreds of thousands of SAP-related activities. And all this frenetic activity always happens within the last few days of every month. It’s no surprise that the biggest concern, according to 97% of CFOs in a survey by FSN Research,

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Close the automation gap: Uncover the real cost of outdated automation

Workload automation (WLA) and scheduling are the workhorses of digital business. Unfortunately, the WLA landscape at many organizations has been built up over time in disconnected silos and layers. Recent analyst research has shown that only 8% of IT leaders believe that they have a unified approach and toolset for automation. At most organizations, core IT processes that support the business are automated using a combination of multiple legacy WLA and scheduling tools that are an average age of 24 years old.

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CSM Bakery Solutions successfully migrates its SAP job scheduling to RunMyJobs® workload automation

Who do you call when you’re in the middle of a major project to migrate all your SAP systems and you have just two weeks to replace your central job scheduling tool at the same time? CSM Bakery Solutions was in just that position in April and put out an urgent RFP. The response wasn’t great. Most job scheduling and workload automation companies either didn’t respond at all or said they couldn’t help. That’s when Redwood Software stepped up with RunMyJobs by Redwood,

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Arla Foods answers four key questions about its month-end close challenges

We asked dairy giant Arla Foods four key questions about the challenges of its month-end close and how to tackle them. The company is the one of the world’s largest dairy companies, selling products in more than 100 countries, with 19,000 employees and revenue of over €10 billion. In the video interview, Arla talks about reducing the time to close the books, the importance of having an overview of the month-end tasks and the challenges presented by the amount of close-related work,

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Reboot automation for hybrid IT: Service orchestration and automation via SaaS

Hybrid IT is now an approach that is widely used by most companies to effectively manage their businesses operations. But running systems and applications across public and private cloud and on-premises technology brings additional complexity that needs to be managed. For a digital business to be competitive, it needs workload automation technology that goes beyond the traditional capabilities of legacy workload or scheduling tools to effectively deal with the range of systems and applications and the growing number of technology types being used.

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Automation as a service delivers the best customer experiences

Reliability and scalability have always been key priorities for IT. With the unprecedented business impacts from COVID-19, they’re requirements. Your services — and your customers — depend on them. Many organizations spend significant time and expense to support the vision of an adaptable, always-on enterprise, and too many struggle to achieve it in spite of that investment. Time consumed by workarounds, patches and daily management, along with costs for on-premises hardware and licensing, can quickly spiral out of control.

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The evolution of financial shared services — from labor arbitrage and cost reduction to value delivery

Despite moves to ease the lockdown, no one needs reminding that it’s still far from business as usual. The huge changes to working practices and processes forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the failings of some traditional approaches to finance. As an extension of many organizations’ accounting capabilities, financial shared services is far from immune to this increased scrutiny, with the current situation prompting questions about how smarter approaches are now needed more than ever before.

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Workload automation is the next step for digital transformation

With the coronavirus crisis putting business as usual on hold, organizations are looking for more resilient ways to manage and reduce IT complexity. This, combined with a sudden need to have employees operate remotely from multiple locations, means that digital transformation plans are moving faster than ever. A key element in successful digital transformation, according to Dan Twing, president of Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™), is the modernization of “the IT tooling used to develop applications and manage the IT infrastructure.” This is where workload automation and job scheduling come in.

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How to prevent a bad audit: Four things you need to address

The role of external auditors is ultimately to assess whether an organization’s financial statements are a true and accurate reflection of the performance of the business. That gives stakeholders, such as investors and partners, confidence in the numbers. But this is no box-ticking exercise. The quality of the audit is paramount, particularly in light of high-profile cases where auditors have been fined for failing to identify fraud or financial misstatement that they should have spotted. Auditors are increasingly focused on issues such as ease of access to evidence that substantiates a transaction or process or compliance testing to ensure controls are fit for purpose and can avoid fraud and human error.

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Throw out the manual: Why auto-certification is key to faster and more accurate balance sheet reconciliation

Huge strides have been made in driving inefficiencies out of many financial processes. Yet balance sheet reconciliation is one of the last bastions of reengineering that has seen very little in the way of efficiency gains over the last decade. Traditionally, businesses have long relied on the accountant’s Swiss Army knife, the Excel spreadsheet, in conjunction with email, workflow systems and shared folders to help with the balance sheet reconciliation process. But it’s an approach that is fraught with problems and often fails to solve underlying issues.

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Purpose built for SaaS: What it means for business

Several tool providers claim to offer workload automation via SaaS, but, in reality they offer on-premises solutions that have been lifted and shifted to the cloud, without any changes made to take advantage of the inherent benefits of this new approach. Sure, by moving existing workload automation tools to the cloud, organizations take away the burden of running the software on an in-house datacenter, but the tools themselves still have the same limiting legacy architecture that causes headaches for businesses and IT.

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Five ways to identify intercompany differences earlier and drive a faster close

Intercompany elimination is a common barrier to a fast and accurate financial close. For large global organizations operating across multiple geographies and time zones, coordinating all the intercompany activities at month-end quickly becomes complex due to the sheer volume and interdependency of tasks and tight deadlines. The problem is that intercompany accounting still requires enormous manual effort to reconcile, adjust and record transactions, despite large investments in ERP and finance systems. In fact, 40% of senior finance professionals say difficulties in reconciliations and intercompany agreement is what delays the reporting process the most,

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