Blog & Newsroom

Ditch the Spreadsheet and Make Your Close Faster and More Accurate with Finance Automation

The month end close is a busy and stressful time for any finance team. One of the key elements to maintain some order within this chaos is task or checklist management. It’s vital to ensure the hundreds of closing tasks are all completed successfully, on time and in the right sequence. The problem is that most organizations still manage their close checklist in a very manual and inefficient way. This creates more stress and errors for those carrying out the tasks and has a negative impact on the accuracy and timeliness of closing the books and reporting group figures.

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Why Automating Journal Entry Upload Is Just the Tip of the Period Close Iceberg

Journal entries are a necessary but manually intensive and time-consuming part of the financial close. For large multinational organizations, some companies within the group might easily process more than a thousand journals each month. We’ve dealt with organizations that do a million manual journals a year. Some level of automation is clearly required to handle that volume of journals, but most organizations are missing the big prize. Think of it like the tip of an iceberg.

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What’s the Secret to Making Your Close a Non-event? Focus on Automating the First Mile

What’s the secret to making your close a non-event? Focus on automating the first mile. The financial close is nothing short of an ongoing battle for many companies. Finance teams come under the same intense pressure at the end of every month, quarter and year as they struggle to complete the hundreds, if not thousands, of interdependent tasks that feed into the close process. At the same time the close is undoubtedly critical to trust,

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How Outdated Automation Leads to More Manual Effort—and What You Can Do About It

IT departments are under pressure. They must ensure the technology that supports their organization is always on and secure. They must also roll out the right new tools to support successful digital business strategy. And they have to do all of this with limited amounts of money, time and skilled people. Given this balancing act, the less manual effort required from IT staff, the better. IT pros should focus on innovation and increased value—not just maintaining the status quo.

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The Great Legacy Workload Automation Escape

“You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!” Readers of a certain age will recognize those eerie lines from the classic Eagles song “Hotel California.” While the meaning behind the tune’s lyrics has long been debated, the line quoted here is essentially about addiction. In a 1970s Hollywood rock star context, we all know what they’re singing about. Unfortunately, this sentiment is equally applicable to the (only slightly) less glamorous world of infrastructure and operations,

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Don’t Take Our Word for It – Experts Say Redwood Is a Workload Automation Leader

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits – easy implementation, scalability, flexibility, efficiency – of switching to a modern SaaS-based workload automation solution and how RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling can maximize these benefits. Now these benefits have been recognized by independent experts as well: Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) has named Redwood as Value Leader and RunMyJobs as the Best workload automation SaaS Solution in its 2019 EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation report.

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Fix Now but Pay Later: The Human Cost of Outdated Scheduling Tools

Legacy schedulers limit your agility to run effective automated processes to support your business. Without built-in connectivity to the wide range of applications, technologies and environments, you end up having to develop manual workarounds. With confusing “new day” scheduling that doesn’t follow on a real 24-hour timeframe, you’ll need more custom, manual workarounds. To compensate further, many teams using outdated schedulers have to create workload tasks and jobs that exist simply make sure other jobs execute properly.

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Find and Stop the Hidden Risks of Legacy Automation

Out-of-date workload automation tools can cause headaches for IT, but they also have wider implications for businesses that shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s likely you’ve read about what can happen: mammoth fines for data breaches, nightmare flight cancellations and communications outages. These incidents cost millions in revenue and productivity. They cost even more in lost goodwill and trust. These events often share something that’s not in the spotlight—technology that’s at the center of their processes—legacy scheduling and workload automation tools.

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Modern Workload Automation Improves Business Outcomes 3 Ways

We’ve already established that migrating to modern workload automation is easier than most people think. There are three key benefits that deliver guaranteed positive business outcomes. In “The Shifting Role of Workload Automation”, analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) found that a majority of IT and business professionals strongly agree that their organization could be made more efficient by upgrading their scheduling and workload automation tools. They’re right. Three of the most attractive outcomes of modern job-scheduling software are that they improve speed,

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It’s Payback Time – Eliminate Technical Debt from Legacy Scheduling and Workload Automation Tools

By Neil Kinson, Chief of Staff, Redwood Software It’s Payback Time – Eliminate technical debt from legacy scheduling and workload automation tools Moving to more agile and modern scheduling and workload automation (WLA) supports your goals now and into the future. It’s clear that organizations that have made the move are happy they’ve made the switch, too. Many IT teams are pleased to discuss how much more efficient they’ve become after upgrading their automation technology.

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The Challenges of Moving from Legacy Schedulers and WLA Tools (and How To Overcome Them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses – all too many – are caught between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’. The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome,

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Why So Many Schedulers? And Why It Causes Headaches

In an ideal world, a single technological solution would provide the answer to all your needs. If it fulfils the fundamentals of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) too, then all the better. In reality though, businesses rarely operate in such a straightforward way. Tools often duplicate some existing capabilities and omit other critical ones. But no one sets out with this goal. What actually happens is that someone has a problem, so they find a solution – it’s not the neatest,

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Process Automation for Unicorns – The Secret to Billion-Dollar Success?

Regular readers of the technology and business press will probably be familiar with the term ‘unicorn’ – first popularized back in 2013 by TechCrunch. It was used in an article about venture capital, and referred to the unlikely eventuality that any startup an investor backed would go on to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was also a fairly narrow definition, as it only looked at US-based software businesses started since 2003.

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Automate for Simplicity and Flexibility

In 1960, Vice Admiral Paul D. Stroop, chief of the US Navy’s weapon’s bureau at the time, put a plan in place to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of producing the Navy’s aerial weaponry. Project KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was born – and it’s a principle that’s still applicable to most enterprises today, despite the seemingly highly-complex, interconnected processes that drive them. Putting automation at the heart of processes is essential to achieve the always-on approach most businesses now require – and settling for time-based batch processing just doesn’t cut it anymore.

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How Does Automation-as-a-Service Work and What Are the Benefits?

The seismic shift to cloud-based services – both consumer and business-facing – isn’t driven by a relentless dedication to using whatever’s hot in technology. It’s happening because this service delivery method brings specific advantages: cost, availability and uptime, to name just a few. According to the Forbes’ 2018 State of the Cloud report, 77% of enterprises have at least one application, or portion of their infrastructure, in the cloud. Many technology-oriented businesses aim to move 100% of services to the cloud.

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The Always-On Enterprise Can’t Exist Without Automation

By Darrell Maronde, Product Marketing Manager, Redwood Software There are few more visible examples of the so-called “always-on” enterprise than Amazon. Whether it’s one-hour parcel deliveries or provisioning an AWS cluster, your interactions with the company and the behind-the-scenes processes are almost fully automated. Each time a customer (or employee, for that matter) interacts with Amazon, a whole host of automated processes within the company’s sprawling IT systems seamlessly kick into gear to ensure that those packages are delivered,

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Upping the Ante: Process Automation Without Collaboration Between Business and IT Stakeholders is a Gamble That Won’t Pay Off

Attempting to roll out any new process or software across a business is always a challenge, but it’s one that can lead to a misguided disillusionment with automation if you don’t collaborate and work together. It isn’t just about identifying the right processes and tasks suitable for being handled by workload automation (WLA) technology such as RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling – it’s also getting the entire company on board with the plans. It’s about ensuring that departments don’t operate in disconnected siloes of information.

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Automated Scheduling in Action: How Whitbread Achieved Automation Success

Since the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to discussing the benefits of automation, as well as the real world costs and potential pitfalls of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA) solutions. And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey. Simplify the landscape One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing.

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The Risks of Out-Of-Date Automation Technology Part 3: A Decreasing Pool of Skills

In the final post of this three-part series, we examine the problems that can arise from a lack of key skills. Don’t miss parts one and two, which looked at sustainability and complexity issues associated with ageing automation technology and the costs of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA), respectively. Any company that relies on outdated automation and scheduling tools runs a plethora of different risks, some of which we’ve looked at previously.

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The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 2: Beware the Hidden Costs

In the first post of this three-part series, we examined the wider issues that can arise in terms of sustainability and complexity. This week, we’re looking at the costs of relying on out-of-date workload automation (WLA) or scheduling technology. The need for a business to be responsive is – as we and those wiser than us have noted many times before – crucial. Whether it’s customer-facing functions or back-office nuts and bolts, the ability to respond immediately to changes is a constant.

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The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 1: Sustainability and Complexity

This is the first post in a three-part series looking at the specific risks to businesses that rely on ageing automation technology. If you look at the automation market today, it can be a confusing landscape – particularly if you don’t already have experience of completing a successful automation project under your belt. On one hand, a large number of options might sound like a good thing: More choice is good, isn’t it? Well, it can be,

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3 Simple Tips for CIOs Undertaking an Automation Project

Last week, we discussed how the role of the CIO, far from being under threat, is becoming more vital than ever before for the successful implementation of wide-ranging projects – particularly where automation is involved. However, to turn that perceived threat into a clear advantage, CIOs will need to embrace changes to their function in the same way they must embrace new technologies. When it comes to automation implementations, there are three key ways a CIO can help ensure success.

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CI Uh-Oh: Is the CIO Role under Threat from Automation?

There’s an assumption that, with the rise of roles like digital transformation officers, CIOs are being overlooked; that they’re being replaced and superseded. That’s not true though. Or at least, it certainly shouldn’t be true, as there are different skill sets required for each. Where digital officers may have the brief to deliver against wide-ranging transformation projects, they aren’t necessarily the people with the deepest technology knowledge. By contrast, the role of the CIO is to ensure the right skills,

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Growing Pains: Why Perpetual Change is the Only Answer

If the constant pressure to modernize, transform and generally maintain a state of perpetual change feels like an invention of the modern age, you’d be wrong. In the 6th Century BCE, Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that “the only thing that is constant is change”. While recognition of the need for change – or indeed, the inevitability of it – isn’t news to businesses, acting on it is by no means easy. The need to implement a digital-first strategy isn’t the sweat-inducing demand that it once was – but the unpleasant truth is that we want to change without going through the uncomfortable process of changing.

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