Elly Yates-Roberts |
The Covid-19 pandemic has created urgency for enterprises across all industries to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, increasing the adoption of cloud applications. Those that quickly presented solutions to adapt and drive rapid innovation are emerging from the pandemic as leaders in their markets.
What is clear now is that organisations are evolving their digital technology, people and processes to set themselves apart from competitors. The increased adoption of cloud applications has also led to an increase in data silos, which can create fragmented business processes and a lack of visibility. To succeed, an automation-first mindset and approach should be adopted.
Automation of business processes is a critical component of any strategy to achieve business scale and velocity. Everything an organisation does should be done looking for opportunities to automate.
However, the automation of business processes can also be a series of challenging technical projects for any organisation. Some of the most critical business processes, such as quote-to-cash or order-to-cash, are complex, span multiple departments through different business applications, and require multiple subject matter experts.
To address this, many companies dedicate technical resources to work directly at the application programming interface level to connect these applications and automate getting the data into the right place. However, this becomes increasingly hard to scale, especially as the number of applications and volume of data in the organisation increases exponentially.
A better strategy to solve the integration problem at scale is to adopt a platform that allows companies to easily automate processes by standardising how applications are integrated and how business processes are automated. By providing essential functionality out of the box – such as guaranteed data delivery, error handling and data monitoring – they remove technical hurdles in building integrations.
To successfully execute an automation strategy, you need to empower everyone in the organisation with the ability to automate the business processes they are closest to. This is where Celigo excels as an integration platform – not only do you get a scalable platform with rich developer tools, but you also get a library of pre-built integration applications with embedded business logic that automate common business processes across popular applications. This massively accelerates the time to automation and provides users with the best practices they need to help them succeed.
This is the best of all worlds, giving IT and partners all the developer tools and governance control of systems in their organisations, while also enabling end users to solve for their needs.
Jan Arendtsz is founder and CEO of Celigo
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.