Today’s digital-first economy and evolving business requirements have changed the way organizations need to approach how core business and IT processes are handled. Manual workflows just can’t operate at the speed, efficiency, or accuracy levels required to stay competitive in today’s environment. Enter Automation-as-a-Service.
In this blog, we will cover what Automation-as-a-Service is, how it works, how enterprises can benefit from automating their workflows and operations, and what role IT operations automation and AI automation solutions play.
IT managers, developers, digital business professionals, or just general automation enthusiasts will learn what matters about automation and how it can help transform operations to realize business value.
What is Automation-as-a-Service
Put simply, Automation-as-a-Service is an approach to process automation that enables customers to outsource repeatable processes, IT service management tasks, and service delivery workflows to a third-party provider as a managed service. By leveraging tools, best practices, and AI intelligence, enterprises can automate routine, manual, and sometimes complex tasks without large upfront investments in infrastructure, licenses, and personnel.
Think of Automation-as-a-Service to include everything from automated incident prevention to self-service request fulfillment through AI-enabled chatbots and autonomous automation platforms like Hexaware’s enterprise automation platform. Put together, organizations can unify workflows across IT and business functions to streamline and standardize processes while increasing efficiency and reliability.
In practice, Automation-as-a-Service replaces manual activities and projects with automated workflows that dynamically scale to meet the changing needs of the enterprise.
Why Automation Matters Today
Digital transformation is happening whether organizations like it or not. Businesses, regardless of industry or size, are looking to do more with less; whether that’s going to market faster, operating more efficiently, delighting users with a better experience, or all of the above. With that level of pressure, traditional manual ways of working within IT and business processes just don’t cut it. They’re slow, costly, and prone to human error. Enterprise automation helps solve these problems by providing:
- Quicker process turnaround times
- Increased accuracy and compliance
- Lower operational costs
- Better employee and customer experience
Automation tools are particularly useful for IT organizations that want to shift from manually reacting to IT incidents to being able to manage IT services proactively. IT operations automation specifically helps convert manual, repetitive tasks like patching, monitoring, and provisioning into self-service activities that require limited human interaction.
Core Components of an Automation-as-a-Service Framework
While specific automation use cases may vary from one organization to the next, most use cases have common building blocks. Below are the fundamental areas that make up Hexaware’s approach to Automation-as-a-Service.
Proactive Incident Prevention
One of the primary benefits of automation is preventing incidents before they occur. Intelligent system monitoring, informed by AI automation tools, can predict and resolve anomalies before they become customer-facing issues.
Automated Service Requests
Many IT and business requests can be automated using a blend of technologies. From IT to HR to finance, automated workflows can service requests with little to no human intervention.
Orchestration
Application, infrastructure, and business rules all have dependencies. Managing these relationships is important for end-to-end automation and is referred to as orchestration.
Self-healing
Systems should be able to self-heal using automated runbooks. Combined with AI-driven assistance, automation can help systems resolve issues without human intervention.
Analytics
Finally, machine learning and optimization spark continuous improvement by shining a light on process bottlenecks.
All of these are centered around Hexaware’s three-pillar approach to automation: agility, efficiency, and experience.
How Automation-as-a-Service Works
Hexaware’s approach to delivering automation-as-a-service combines people, processes, and technology to enable delightful automation experiences. Here’s how it works:
Assess and Plan
Gaining a baseline understanding of how things work today is critical to planning for an exciting future. Understanding the intricacies of an organization’s current processes, workloads, and pain points allows an automation provider to map out workflows and identify areas of automation.
Choosing the Right Tools
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to automation tools. At Hexaware, we take a tool-agnostic approach and use technology that is the best fit for the task at hand. Part of Hexaware’s automation stack includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analytics integrated into the Tensai® platform for hyper automation across IT and business functions.
Design
Using best-in-class, low-code or no-code tooling, Hexaware automates workflows by orchestrating several systems and processes. This spans IT infrastructure automation all the way to business process automation.
Build and Test
Flexibility and adaptability are key. Hexaware ensures that all automated solutions are flexible, secure by design, adhere to governance standards, and are fully compliant before going live.
Manage and Monitor
Automation doesn’t stop once the workflow is released. Every solution we build is monitored using customizable dashboards and KPIs. This allows us to not only optimize existing automations but also identify new automation opportunities to help increase automation maturity.
This lifecycle approach to automation ensures that every solution we build for customers is geared towards continuous improvement.
Use Cases Across IT and Business Functions
IT operations automation is just one area where customers are realizing massive value through automation. Business functions like HR, finance, service delivery, and IT configuration management are also automating processes to streamline workflows and improve operations.
IT Operations Automation
Tasks like automated monitoring, patching, and other routine IT workflows can drastically improve service uptime and free up staff to focus on more important things.
Service Desk Automation
With the increased prevalence of chatbots and virtual agents, automation tools can now handle a large portion of service requests with little to no human interaction.
Business Process Automation
Whether it’s automating data entry tasks, invoice processing, or even sending customer notifications, business process automation helps streamline everyday tasks.
Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure components can be automatically provisioned and scaled without having to manually create new VMs every time.
Compliance Automation
With built-in governance, automation can help create audit trails and automatically enforce policies to keep businesses compliant.
The list goes on. Every industry we serve has experienced tremendous savings both in time and money by automating processes.
Benefits of Automation-as-a-Service
Investing in the right automation technology can provide benefits to your organization, such as:
Efficiency
Workflows that have been automated typically run faster and with greater accuracy. Eliminating errors means less re-work and lower operating costs.
Better Quality & Reliability
System reliability increases when you have AI-driven tools proactively notifying you of outages before they happen. Application performance and user experience also improve when manual tasks are eliminated.
Scalability
Because automation is a service, it scales with you as your business grows. There are no predefined architecture limitations.
Productivity
Employees are free to focus on higher-level work instead of busywork.
Discussing your business goals and how automation can help you reach them is the first step towards your digital transformation journey.
How Hexaware Powers Enterprise Automation
Leveraging AI, ML, NLP, and every automation tool in between, Hexaware provides customers with an enterprise automation solution that spans every layer of your infrastructure and business functions. Here’s how we do it:
Tensai® Hyper Automation Platform
Our enterprise automation offering, Tensai® is a unified automation suite designed to automate everything from your IT infrastructure to your business processes and more. Featuring automated orchestration, runbook optimization, experience automation, and much more.
AI-First
By embedding AI automation solutions into the core of Tensai, we can help you prevent incidents before they happen, automate decision-making, and gain unprecedented insight into your systems to drive continuous performance improvement.
Automation Everywhere
Whether you need infrastructure automation, app services automation, BPA, or test automation, Hexaware has you covered. We’ll help you automate every layer of your operations for seamless end-to-end automation.
Best Practices for Successful Automation Initiatives
Like any technology implementation, proper planning needs to happen before jumping headfirst into automation. Following these best practices will help ensure your teams realize a greater ROI from your automation efforts.
- Approach automation with clear business objectives in mind.
- Identify automation use cases that will have the biggest impact.
- Flexibility is key. Implement a tool-agnostic automation framework.
- Make sure security and compliance are designed into your solutions from day one.
- Continuously monitor your automation workflows and iterate!
Taking a strategic approach to your automation initiatives will help you avoid costly mistakes and experience automation benefits sooner.
Challenges and How to Overcome Them
As with any technology implementation, enterprises will face challenges when trying to automate existing processes. Some common challenges we’ve seen include:
- Outdated legacy technology
- Change-resistant cultures
- Lack of in-house skills
The key to fighting these challenges is partnering with a third-party provider who has experience modernizing legacy workloads, enabling culture change, and has a team of skilled automation experts that can handle any job. Additionally, using flexible, AI-enabled automation platforms will allow for adaptable automation down the road.
Plus, focusing on achieving quick wins will not only help your bottom line but also gain you the trust and buy-in you need to enable large-scale automation initiatives.
Future of Automation in the Enterprise
We believe the future of automation is autonomous. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, and autonomous agents will drive fully self-driving business and IT systems. Below are some emerging trends we see shaping the future of automation.
- Intelligent agents
- Predictive automation
- Unified automation strategy tied to business objectives
Here at Hexaware, we continue to invest in next-generation automation technologies to help our clients not just reach their automation maturity goals, but exceed them. Want to see how automation can help your organization reach its digital transformation goals? Get in touch with one of our experts today!
Conclusion
Automation is no longer just a nice-to-have feature; it’s a must-have if you want to stay competitive in today’s digital economy. Building an automation strategy that aligns with business objectives is critical to your digital transformation success.
