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SOAPs: How workload automation is evolving according to Gartner® 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 potlight

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 Software 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

Improper revenue recognition poses significant risks to organizations. Whether it’s due to unintentional error or deliberate accounting fraud, incorrect revenue recognition can lead to financial penalties, regulatory scrutiny and lasting reputational damage. As regulatory frameworks tighten and stakeholder expectations rise, companies must proactively address vulnerabilities in their revenue recognition processes. This is where finance automation can play a pivotal role. The importance of revenue recognition Revenue recognition is one of the most critical aspects of financial reporting,

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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 upfront 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

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 Finance Automation by Redwood, Jabil achieved: 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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The Easy Way to Bring Best-of-Breed Apps into Your Processes

As your organization advances through digital transformation, it’s only natural that you want the applications that will drive the changes and improvements to be a good fit with your organization and be the best at what they do. And, as these best-of-breed apps will be crucial to your business operations, they need to be integrated into your process automation capabilities. That can be easier said than done, however. Many automation solutions may not support applications outside a narrow ecosystem without customization,

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How RunMyJobs makes it easy to automate securely

Automation reduces manual effort, increases efficiency and flexibility and improves operations. The more systems, processes and data you orchestrate through your automation platform, the bigger the payoff. But these outcomes are only possible if the automation platform is secure. RunMyJobs by Redwood is a SaaS workload automation that provides the secure automation modern enterprises need because it is built with security in mind. Here’s how. Secure by design RunMyJobs is uncompromising on security features with its security-first,

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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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Automation Predictions for 2021

What do your peers see in the year ahead in the world of process automation and orchestration? From conversations with IT leaders and decades of experience, Redwood shares its outlook for 2021. Cost-reduction remains a priority Regardless of the increasing demands to deliver more reliable, better customer experiences, and investment needed for digital transformation, cost-reduction will remain a significant driver of IT initiatives. Budgets will not be increased and may even decrease in 2021.

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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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