Blog & Newsroom

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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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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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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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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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. Redwood’s RunMyJobs® SaaS workload automation 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, single-tenant design – in which customers have a singular,

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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 Redwood’s RunMyJobs® use these same concepts to simplify the effort in building automated processes.

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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 innovation SaaS-based workload automation such as Redwood’s RunMyJobs® makes it easy to build elegant automated business processes.

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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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How to Escape the Misery of Maintenance

It can often feel like keeping your day-to-day automated business processes running is a major source of disruption and pain, especially when it comes time for an upgrade. Why is upgrading and maintaining your automation systems so stressful? It shouldn’t be. The problem with most automation tools is that you’re responsible for everything about them. You own their full technology stack, from networking, storage, servers and operating systems through to automation data and client applications. .

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How Santa Takes the Stress out of Christmas

As Santa prepares for his busiest time of the year on Christmas Eve, he has a lot on his plate. But he knows that he has the support of his elves and finely-honed processes perfected over hundreds of years to get everything done. Safe in the knowledge that the Christmas present lists have been received and processed, and that the toys will be produced and delivered like clockwork, Santa can focus on readying his reindeer and preparing the sleigh for the big night ahead.

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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 stepped up with our RunMyJobs® SaaS workload automation.

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Do You Use Automation to Its Full Potential?

Workload automation or scheduling technology will already be running important processes in your business. But it’s unlikely you’ll have a clear understanding of how your organization really uses automation, or what is truly possible using modern workload automation. Over the decades, the workload automation and scheduling technology landscape has evolved with disconnected silos and layers. As a result, recent analyst research suggests that only 8% of IT leaders believe they have a unified approach to automation.

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Future-Proof Your IT Ops Now

In the wake of the ongoing global health crisis, business and IT leaders are looking for ways to improve the resilience of their operations no matter what is thrown at them. So what do organizations need to do to achieve this resilience, while also remaining competitive? An analysis conducted by Harvard Business Review (HBR) of the companies that flourished following the last three recessions found that the companies that emerged in the strongest shape “relied less on layoffs to cut costs and leaned more on operational improvements”

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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, and costs for on-premises hardware and licensing can quickly spiral out of control.

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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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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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How Automation-as-a-Service Drives Success in Digital Transformation

Digital business transformation, defined by Gartner as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model,” requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they operate to become much more agile. Workload automation as a service, delivered via SaaS, provides critical support for this agility by fully exploiting the attributes of cloud technology. One of the challenges that comes with digital business transformation is increased complexity due to a hybrid approach in which systems are located in and interoperate across different on-premises,

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