The bottom line is that data automation is a necessity for any leader wishing to grow and streamline their business. Whether you oversee a leading enterprise firm or run a small-to-medium-sized business, the ability to collect, organize and analyze data with maximum accuracy and ease will prove to be crucial for your business’s sustainability and success in the long run.
In your business’s digital transformation journey, you’ve come to understand the importance of data but may still be unsure what role automation will play in your data management plan. Below, we’ll cover what it is you need to know while outlining key actions to help you get started.
What is data automation?
As the name suggests, data automation refers to the automatic entry, movement, or usage of data throughout your business. This means that instead of manual entry or intervention, data is updated programmatically, such as through a data quality platform.
In most cases, data automation will involve ETL, also referred to as the three common elements: Extract, Transform, and Load:
- Extract data from the necessary system or systems
- Transform via data cleansing and establishing data consistency
- Load the data into a designated database or system
Rather than fixating on manually collecting data, data automation focuses on helping your company remove the time and guesswork surrounding data entry and analytics.
What are the benefits of data automation?
In your business’s digital transformation journey, you may be wondering how important automation truly is for the future of your company’s data management strategy. Still on the fence? Here’s a look at 5 benefits that data automation offers to help transform your data management processes.
1. Time saved across channels
One of the major benefits of data automation is the reduction of time necessary for data entry and maintenance. Regardless of your business’s size, it’s never easy to process any volume of data coming in from various sources. Plus, manual intervention leaves a very high room for error—which of course requires additional time when fixed at a future date.
For any business wishing to streamline how they handle data, data automation is a must. You’ll find it easier to maintain key customer data while sharing data insights across your organization, too.
2. Enhanced data reliability
Your data is only as useful as it is reliable, meaning data accuracy is pertinent. If you can’t count on your data, how can you expect to make the most informed decisions in your business? Data automation increases the reliability of the information you use daily, removing the guesswork from the equation.
This means you’ll have the confidence necessary to execute key business strategies with accurate data and analytics to back your decisions.
3. Maximized use of resources
Whenever automation is an option, it should be leveraged. Why? Data extraction, transformation, and processing is a monotonous task that takes up a considerable portion of your employees’ time that would be better spent on other tasks. Oftentimes, it’s simple to retrieve data from a source system and ensure automatic updates. Since data is never static, you’ll remove this tedious task from your team’s workload—ensuring that you’re maximizing the resources and everyone’s time to its fullest potential.
4. Seamless integration capabilities
Data automation also provides you with the means necessary to effectively “link” data across systems. If your business opts to leverage software integrations to improve the contact data quality in your CRM or ERP system, automation can prevent and identify any duplicate data entries with ease. Since integrations are likely to play a crucial role in improving your contact data quality, you’ll want to leverage data automation to simplify the process.
5. Better Scalability
If your business is on the smaller side, you may think that the use of software, tools, or any form of automation is unnecessary. After all, data automation is only required for enterprise organizations, right? Well, not quite.
One of the top overarching objectives of any business is growth. Realistically, handling data solely through manual methods are outdated, leaves countless room for error, and is unsustainable for anyone experiencing growth. Ultimately, data automation is not only a crucial part of saving money and time when it comes to how your company tackles data usage and management, but it’s also necessary when growing as a business, too.
How can I get started on data automation?
From a data management point of view, data automation is a must across all verticals and for businesses and enterprises of every size. Our team of data quality experts is here to help you get started.
