What Is Automation?

Automation is using various tools and systems to perform tasks with no or minimal human intervention. Many business processes have repeatable or tedious tasks that are inefficient for humans to perform, such as monitoring machinery 24/7 or manual data entry. Automation combines hardware, software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to perform tasks without continuous human input. You apply technologies that reduce time and increase consistency and accuracy in task performance. Automation accelerates workflows, increases productivity, and brings cost-efficiency to organizations at scale.

Organizations need ways to streamline processes, reduce costs, and empower their employees as they grow. Automation helps organizations operate and scale more effortlessly by enabling the following.

Improve productivity

Automation technologies reduce manual intervention in manufacturing, IT, healthcare, and other industries. Human workers might make mistakes when carrying out mundane and repetitive tasks. When aided by automated solutions, they perform more efficiently, leading to productivity gains and reduced wastage. Automation software schedules, implements, and monitors business processes to ensure consistent and high-quality output.

Increase profitability

Applying automated solutions enables organizations to improve their financial outcomes. Organizations can operate beyond working hours. Instead of hiring more workforce, they can achieve a competitive advantage with a leaner operation when expanding their activities.

You can also reskill workers who previously worked on low-impact tasks to offer higher business values. This way, workers can focus on critical challenges, play a more significant role, and contribute to maximizing revenue.

Strengthen safety and security

Organizations need help securing their assets and workforce. Automation tools can help them continuously monitor for anomalies, suspicious activities, and threats. When responding to incidents, the software alerts the perspective personnel in charge, ensuring a quick mitigative response and disruption-free operations.

Organizations integrate automation technology with their workflows to improve efficiency, reduce labor costs, and more. We share common usage of workflow automation in various industries.

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to effective prospecting, capturing leads, increasing sales, and retaining customers. However, the process involved is time-consuming and complex. Various stakeholders in the customer acquisition lifecycle must share customer information transparently and quickly to ensure customer satisfaction.

With business automation software, you can streamline sales, marketing, and support activities more effectively. Your marketing team can automatically schedule emails to nurture leads captured from landing pages. Then, automated CRM software assigns potential prospects to respective sales personnel. Salesforce uses AWS Datasync to provide marketers with comprehensive customer information to increase conversion automatically.

Cloud computing

Migrating digital assets from on-premise to the cloud requires provisioning, managing, scaling, and maintaining cloud infrastructure. Organizations must also transfer their workloads, integrate with various third-party services, and back up data. The tasks require IT administrators to manage different cloud components, which can be overwhelming.

With automation tools, organizations can simplify cloud management. Instead of spending hours setting up cloud servers, some providers automatically provision them.

For example, Futbal Club Barcelona hosts and automates its web platform on the cloud with AWS. By using AWS CloudFormation, they effortlessly deployed their product in a flexible, scalable, and managed cloud environment.

Supply chain management

Inventory management helps commerce businesses to anticipate sales demands by ensuring adequate supplies. To ensure companies can fulfill production and sales orders at all times, inventory managers must oversee inventory tracking, back-ordering, fulfillment, and more. It involves closely coordinating with logistic providers in real time.

Automated inventory management systems frees purchasing managers from manually cross-checking their stocks. Meanwhile, logistic companies automate their fleets to ensure their clients receive their goods promptly.

For example, Carrier leverages AWS IoT Core and other managed services to reduce spoilage, delays, and costs in its cold chain operations.

Compliance audits

Organizations must comply with industrial regulations enforced by respective authorities. Compliance requires periodic auditing, generating audit trails, and monitoring digital assets for privacy risks. Failing to do so can result in penalties and operational disruption.

To prevent that, organizations apply automated solutions to augment compliance checks. They use software that automatically analyzes documents, business processes, and other cloud workloads for potential compliance breaches. Automation allows organizations to be more proactive in governing and securing data.

For example, GE Appliances uses AWS CloudTrail to track user activities across its cloud environment and simplify risk auditing.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers strive to balance cost, quality, safety, and timely delivery in production lines. Whether manufacturing food or electronics, each production stage is crucial in ensuring satisfactory outcomes. Therefore, manufacturing companies invest in intelligent automation solutions that enhance efficiency and reduce human errors.

Automation technologies can automate repetitive tasks, such as drilling, assembling, and molding. They also help manufacturers perform preventive maintenance on complex machinery. For example, Baxter International automatically monitors its facilities with Amazon Monitron to prevent costly downtime. Monitron automatically collects and analyzes data to identify potential failures.

Software development

Software development practices have evolved to meet fast-changing user requirements. Developers must plan, code, test, and deploy fast while delivering bugs-free apps. Conventionally, most processes in building software are done manually. Introducing automation allows developers to avoid repetitive work and focus on implementing business logic.

Instead of spending too much time reviewing codes, they can use automated code review tools to save time. Better still, developers can implement an entire automated software delivery workflow like 3M Health Information Systems. The company uses AWS CodePipeline to set up continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in just a few clicks.

Automation involves software tools that streamline workflows by performing repetitive tasks previously done by human workers. You can automate each task as attended or unattended.

Attended automation

Attended automation requires a certain degree of human involvement. For example, support teams use virtual assistants to find and summarize reports while engaging with customers in real-time. The support personnel oversee the automated software throughout the process and ensure it delivers the correct report.

Unattended automation

Unattended automation doesn't require manual intervention. Antivirus software that automatically scans and isolates malware is unattended automation. In unattended automation, the software runs in the background and waits for a trigger. Triggers are events that start an automated action. For example, an email autoresponder is triggered when a customer subscribes with their email address. Although unattended automation runs without human supervision, you can configure the software to send alerts for specific events, such as when someone makes a purchase.

Automation describes a process that replaces human labor with technologies when performing repetitive tasks. It can take different forms depending on the use case, systems, and context.

Robotic process automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) involves using software capable of accomplishing manual tasks on behalf of humans. RPA software, called software bots, can fill out forms, click on specific buttons, extract data, make rules-based decisions, and accomplish other designated tasks.

Business process automation

Business process automation (BPA) streamlines workflows within an organization by enabling transparent document management and efficient inter-department communication. Often, BPA integrates several enterprise applications an organization uses to move, transform, and utilize information with an automation platform.

Industrial automation

Industrial automation consists of industrial robots, sensors, and control systems that companies use to manufacture products. When integrated, these components allow manufacturers better control of quality, cost, and safety.

Home automation

Home automation connects appliances to enable smarter controls in households. For example, with Amazon Alexa-supported smart home systems, you can automatically dim lighting, control temperature, and access cameras.

Cognitive automation

Cognitive automation, or intelligent automation, applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to help analysts make informed decisions. Instead of relying on manual deduction, they use AI-powered tools to identify patterns and make predictions from volumes of information.

Retail automation

The retail industry uses automation to save consumers time. Retail businesses integrate RFID tags, cashier-less checkouts, and computer vision systems, allowing shoppers to skip the queues.

AWS provides managed services that help organizations across various industries automate their process workflows. From compliance risk audits to accelerating incident responses, AWS's automated services enable agile innovation with minimum human intervention. For example, you can use AI/ML services on AWS to accelerate generative AI development for specific business needs.

Cloud operations are also more effortless with AWS's suite of automation services.

• AWS ControlTower sets up a multi-account environment and automatically governs user activities.

• AWS Trusted Advisor automatically evaluates your AWS environment and recommends measures to reduce costs, improve performance, and strengthen security.

• AWS Simple Notification Service allows apps to notify each other automatically of specific events.

Get started with automation by signing up for an AWS account today.