Blog & Newsroom

Enterprise job orchestration tools: Choose the right automation solution

As business processes and workflows become more and more complex, the risks associated with inefficiency, errors and sluggishness to adopt modern practices go up dramatically. Fortunately, there is a solution to mitigate those risks — job orchestration. Here, we’ll explain how job orchestration tools can bring your enterprise into the next generation of efficient, reliable, automated IT orchestration solutions. What job orchestration is Simply put, job orchestration is taking disparate business processes throughout your enterprise and bringing their oversight and management together in one location.

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What You Need to Know About Cloud Orchestration and Automation Tools

Forbes reports that the world is projected to store 180 zettabytes of data in the cloud by 2025. This presents a major challenge: Despite the benefits cloud services deliver to myriad benefits to businesses, including reliable scalability, flexibility in providing new services and the ability to quickly deploy new technologies, they drive up the requirements for managing and monitoring lots of processes, tasks and systems.  As adoption of new cloud technologies increased the number of management tasks that had to be performed by IT,

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How to bring your SAP processes into the future with Redwood

Many enterprises that use SAP as their ERP are somewhere in the process of making the big move to S/4HANA. According to ASUG (America’s SAP User Group), 31% of SAP users have made the move, 13% have started, and 42% are making plans to move. This migration is a complex undertaking for IT teams but drives and delivers more value for their organization. As part of this strategic focus on S/4HANA, SAP will end support after December 2024 for many applications that rely on the NetWeaver Java stack—including SAP BPA by Redwood.

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Three Key Takeaways from SAP Sapphire 2022

Last week, I attended SAP Sapphire 2022. It was great to see people face-to-face and connect with colleagues, SAP experts, and customers in Orlando, Florida. The event was really focused on three major themes, speed of business change, supply chain disruption, and sustainability. Below are my key takeaways from the event. A renewed commitment to customer value SAP has been showing increased commitment to helping customers achieve real business value with the RISE with SAP initiative for S/4HANA.

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How GROWMARK Consolidated their Workload Automation with Redwood

Enterprise companies have been using automation tools for decades, starting way back with batch schedulers and overnight processing. Over time, new automation tools have been incorporated into IT environments to meet changing business needs and provide new capabilities. These tools are often added to automate specific types of tasks for individual business units such as finance or HR or automate specific systems, like an ERP. As a result, many enterprise IT teams now find themselves overseeing implementations of multiple automation tools,

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SaaS or On-Prem Workload Automation: Which One is Right for Your Business?

It’s an ongoing challenge to balance immediate IT ecosystem needs against future-proofing your business. Every day, IT leaders are making decisions about which enterprise applications, servers, and services should be moved to the cloud, and which will, or must, remain on-prem. When deciding where to deploy workload automation in your business, there are advantages and tradeoffs between cloud-based SaaS and on-prem workload automation.  Cloud-native SaaS workload automation can bring significant benefits to an enterprise—including efficiency, resiliency,

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Make 2022 The Year Of Digital Transformation: Why Automation Is The Key

This article was published in 2022 at a time when the pandemic was accelerating digital transformation for many organizations. Now in 2024, business process automation has come a long way as enterprises continue to evolve cloud strategies and incorporate emerging technologies such as AI. See what automation expert and Redwood Chief Product Officer Abhijit Kakhandiki is predicting for this year in his post Automation ROI, Hyperautomation, Generative AI for Automation — What’s Coming in 2024.

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What Enterprises Need to Know About Workload Automation in 2022 and Beyond

This article was published in 2022 based on then-current findings and insights from Gartner and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) industry analysts. Visit Redwood Analyst Pieces page to access the most recent resources from industry analysts. Industry analysts like Gartner and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) have spoken, and the message is clear: workload automation for business processes across an enterprise is absolutely essential in the current workplace landscape. Those who aren’t implementing new functionality and integration capabilities from modern workload automation platforms can expect to rapidly fall behind the competition.

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SOAPs: How workload automation is evolving according to Gartner®Gartner’s Workload Automation Trends

Learn about the evolution of job scheduling and workload automation solutions into Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). Changes to IT environments and processes have continued to skyrocket in recent years. Digital transformation initiatives are now characterized by cloud adoption, workload automation (WLA) and process orchestration across complex ecosystems. As a result, the automation strategies and tools you choose for enterprise use cases must evolve. Traditional approaches and cloud automation solutions can’t meet the needs of the new IT environment and the changing face of business.

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Automation Strategies Must Evolve To Meet Dynamic Business Needs

This article is based in part on our eBook, “The Future Is Now: Why It’s Time To Invest In Workload Automation.” Today’s enterprises are deploying new technologies and realigning them to their business strategies. The goal for most is to improve flexibility as they navigate dynamic challenges and circumstances. This includes adapting to lockdowns and social distancing, evolving consumer expectations and supply chain uncertainty. For most enterprises, this represents a new normal — the world is quickly changing and the organizations that can adapt the quickest are most likely to succeed.

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Modern Automation for Utilities: How to Optimize Meter-to-Cash and Streamline Revenue Flow

As a modern utility, you face a growing number of challenges — rising consumer expectations, evolving technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, the always-growing complexities of regulatory compliance, and more. But meeting these challenges isn’t impossible. It just requires a commitment to evolve and incorporate the best automation solutions for your particular requirements.  Undertaking an automation initiative for utilities starts with mapping out its unique processes, specifically around meter-to-cash. By optimizing automation of this end-to-end process,

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Break Free from the Tyranny of Time

Clocks can keep your business ticking along in precision as it should, right? It sounds logical, but when it comes to automating business processes in your organization, the clock has significant limitations. Scheduling processes to run at certain times of the day creates a fragile, brittle system that can easily go wrong and disrupt your entire organization. In IT operations, you must guess when a process should begin, and how long it will take, in order to schedule the next one.

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Increased Tax Authority Scrutiny Puts Transfer Pricing Compliance in the Spotlight

Multinational corporations face compliance challenges in 2021 as intercompany agreements and transfer pricing come under increased scrutiny by hawkish tax authorities. The OECD estimates intra-group transfers make up more than 60% of world trade, underlining why tax authorities globally are taking greater enforcement to prevent intercompany transfer pricing being used to reduce the tax burden of the parent company. The underlying arms-length principle of transfer pricing is that the price should be at a fair market price,

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How Automation and Analytics Help CFOs Rise to the Growing ESG Reporting Challenge

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting is rapidly rising on the corporate agenda as investors look beyond traditional financial performance to evaluate the longer-term growth opportunities and risks for companies. According to a PwC report, institutional investors view ESG as critical to understanding the full risk profile of a company and evaluating how prepared it is for the future. And they want standardized, rigorous data to support their investment decisions. In a CFA Institute survey,

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Accelerating the SAP IBP Supply Chain: 60% Time Savings with Redwood Process Automation

SAP IBP (Integrated Business Planning ) is SAP’s flagship planning product for cloud-based supply chain management, providing functionality for procurement, distribution, and inventory.  SAP IBP consists of several modules that work together to manage data and coordinate supply chain processes. For example, the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) module can generate forecasts for demand, supply, product and portfolio changes, strategic projects, and related financial impact for the upcoming period. These SAP IBP modules depend on data from various upstream SAP systems and modules.

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The Top Considerations When Migrating Workload Automation

You understand the benefits that modern SaaS-based workload automation solution can bring to your organization, and you’re ready to move away from your existing technology. Now it’s time to think about migrating to the new solution. This process can seem daunting, especially if you have a vast inventory of processes built on various on-premises legacy solutions over many years. We at Redwood can help. You may even be surprised at how less daunting the process can be.

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4 Benefits of Automated Rule-Based Controls for Finance and Accounting

Finance needs to perform many controls and checks as part of its accounting and reporting responsibilities, ensuring the numbers accurately reflect the reality of the business. Crucially, finance needs confidence that the figures  recorded in SAP (or any other ERP system) represent what is actually happening in the business? Some examples of accounting controls performed by finance include: End-of-day checks: Have all production orders been closed? Has a manufactured item been moved into stock,

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Is Your Automation Being Crushed by Cloned Processes?

It sounds like something out of a ‘50’s B-movie, but your business could be in danger of being crushed by clones – cloned variants of existing processes that are nearly identical. A simple task like backing up servers can lead to tens of thousands of nearly-identical cloned processes — one for each server — getting in the way and costing you money. How does this happen? Many automation tools require a separate job definition for each variant of a process,

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5 Major Revenue Recognition Risks and How Finance Automation Can Help

Revenue recognition poses significant risks to organizations –  when revenue has been improperly or incorrectly recognized due to error or fraud, potential penalties and reputational damage can occur. In the US for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has detailed guidelines on revenue recognition in its Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 101. The overarching guiding principle is that revenue should not be recognized until it is realized or realizable and earned, which is generally when the following conditions have been met: Persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists Delivery has occurred or services have been rendered The seller’s price to the buyer is fixed and determinable The ability to collect the revenue is reasonably assured However,

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Tackle Technical Debt with Redwood’s RunMyJobs

What do we mean by technical debt in the context of workload automation? It’s an accumulation of quick fix workarounds that build up as a result of the limitations of old and out-of-date legacy scheduling or workload automation tools. These workarounds are called “debt” because they’re compromises that add an ongoing and future burden to the organization that can only be repaid by extra work. Technical debt costs a huge amount of manual effort and time as your best team members become firefighters,

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Arla Foods Automates to Improve Consistency and Frequency of Its Energy Taxes Reconciliation

Global dairy company Arla Foods has automated the reconciliation and settlement of its energy taxes, eliminating administrative work and human error and allowing the organization to complete the process – with greater accuracy – monthly instead of annually. As part of its energy taxes reconciliation process, Arla Foods collects meter readings in Impero from its Danish dairies, along with the utility company invoice data in SAP. These numbers are then compared against the energy taxes that Arla pays up front to identify instances where the company is entitled to a refund.

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Does Your Finance Team Have the Skills to Deliver Digital Transformation?

Digital investments top the CFO agenda for 2021, according to analyst Gartner’s survey of finance leaders. However, the analyst warns that without plugging the digital skills gap in finance, CFOs will struggle to fully benefit from these digital investments in technologies such as advanced analytics, automation and AI. According to Gartner, there are five key digital competencies applicable to finance work. These competencies are technological literacy, digital translation, digital learning and development,

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Jabil Reveals 4 Benefits of Digitizing the Financial Close Process

By Redwood Software Global manufacturing services company Jabil achieved four major benefits by automating and digitizing manual tasks across its month-end close and record-to-report (R2R) process. Using Redwood’s finance automation, Jabil achieved these benefits: Time savings Standardization Data quality Reduction in potential audit fees Speaking in a recent webinar with sharedserviceslink, Scott Barone, director of the finance digital PMO at Jabil, explained that the automation project started by surveying finance teams across both the corporate and individual site functions globally,

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Why it’s Time to Adopt Modern Batch Processing and Workload Orchestration

If you’re still batch processing like you were five—or even two—years ago, it’s time for a change. Batch processing was designed for efficiency and convenience. It’s a method of scheduling groups of jobs (batches) to be processed at the same time – with or without human intervention. Traditionally, batch workloads have been processed during batch windows, which are periods of time when overall CPU usage is low (typically overnight). Why overnight? Batch workloads can require high CPU cycles,

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