Data automation is one of the possible ways of leveraging data your company accumulates without making it an overwhelming burden. Today, we’ll consider how data automation can help you to turn the business info in your possession into a valuable asset that requires minimal human effort to work with.

Making Your Data Work For You

First of all, let’s talk about what we mean about data automation. The process usually involves the adoption of automated data processing tools whose primary intention is to simplify the following core elements:

  • Extracting data from the initial source;
  • Transforming it into a new form according to the current goals;
  • Loading it somewhere you can easily access, for example, a cloud database or data warehouse.

The main goal is to eliminate the need for human interaction as much as possible and make the path that info travels from raw data to easy-to-read charts and graphs smoother. Of course, this scenario does not mean the complete replacement of human employees with artificial intelligence. Business is all about the interaction between people, and it’s barely possible for a machine to predict everything that could go wrong and react with human flexibility. Instead, data automation eliminates dozens of repeating tasks and helps focus on data and possibilities it holds.

Thanks to automation and the possibility to shift responsibilities for data collection, transformation, and processing from human shoulders to AI algorithms and software solutions, you can reap multiple benefits. First of all, you can reduce the time needed to process data that your company gathers. The info you work with usually updates in a real-time mode. Every new order and every new client generates dozens of records you have to track and analyze.

If you use an online marketplace, you also should be able to process data that does not generate direct income since it does not relate to orders made. For example, the time the user spends on a specific product page can also be a valuable source of information. Gathering info that comes from different sources, converting it to a human-readable format, analyzing it for patterns are the tasks that, without automation, will require very significant time and labour costs. Thus, automation allows you to decrease the time for efficient data analysis and save money.

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Besides increasing the overall performance of your business, data automation can also enable effortless scalability. As you grow your business, enter new markets, and open new branches in different cities, the task of providing all your data analysts with precise real-time information may become more complicated. For example, suppose you decide to make some changes in how your organization operates. In such a situation, there must be a team of employees that will update the information in the system and make sure that everyone involved with this data receives a notification on the latest changes. On the other hand, data automation helps to simplify all these routine tasks and reduce the probability of human error. In this case, made changes can be automatically propagated through all your systems, and staff will receive timely notifications. It doesn’t matter how big you are. If you automate timely, your company will not succumb due to lack of access to data.

Reducing delays caused by manual data handling, you can respond faster to new requests from your clients and gradually increase customer satisfaction. Moreover, after you automate your data processing, access to consistent and up to date information will help you plan better sales and marketing strategies.

Data Automation Tips

If you decide to automate your data flow, in most cases, you can entirely rely on the expertise of a custom software development company you’ll decide to cooperate with. However, it’s critical to understand how data automation can be achieved. In this case, you can better prepare for the whole process and complete it with a minimum investment of time.

First of all, it’s essential to separate the data you want to automate from the data you need to automate. The desire to automate everything possible may be very natural but not the most optimal. Sales, clients, warehouses, and data they generate should undoubtedly be included in the automation pipeline. The stream of this information fuels your business, and you can’t underestimate its importance. However, any other info that invests into the prosperity of your business or takes too long to process must be taken into account as well. Every piece of information you use regularly, often update, transform before the use, accumulate from different sources must not escape your eye.

Before you automate your data, you must better understand it. Therefore, check where your business receives the information and categorize these sources according to their value and ease of access. Next, analyze how your employees work with business data and how it’s stored. Finally, find the tasks that take the longest to complete. The longer the specific activity takes, the more time you will win if you automate it. Following this rule, you can prioritize data-related tasks requiring automation you want to take care of.

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After you finish with the described tasks and decide if there’s the need to transform any data for better compatibility with the new system, it’s time to define the set of features for the automated data management system. This feature list entirely depends on your business specifics and should result from collaboration with your custom software developer. To ensure that you always deal with the relevant information and there’s no need for any human intervention to keep the info up-to-date, it’s necessary to schedule data for updates.

Conclusions

The info you have to work with can be both a heavy burden and life-giving moisture that can turn your business into a blooming garden. It all depends on choosing the right approach. Manual data processing can be quite a hassle, involving a lot of time-consuming tasks that a computer can do in the blink of an eye. We can consider data automation as an evolutionary leap that allows you to rely on cutting-edge technologies instead of trying to fetch something meaningful from an inexhaustible river of data manually.

Please contact us if you’re sure that your business can benefit from data automation but don’t know where to start.