Automated data processing does the heavy-lifting for you, so you can do productive and creative work.
Stuck manually updating data for that Excel report? There is a better way to spend your time at the office.
Automated data processing can do the heavy-lifting for you and liberate your schedule for more productive and creative work.
Automatic data processing (ADP) refers to any use of technology that automatically performs data tasks with no to minimal human interaction.
ADP can take care of:
But do you need automated data processing?
To understand if you need specialized data automation tools, take an inventory of all your business processes.
Time for a mini-challenge!
For each business process, identify what data workloads form part of the process. Then ask yourself:
Let’s look at a complete example. Let’s say you are preparing your end-of-quarter sales report.
All of the steps above take time and are not fun to make. This process (and others that you have identified with this mini-challenge) can easily be automated with ADP.
But why would you automate business processes with ADP?
There are 5 main advantages to using ADP for your company.
Data automation saves a lot of time.
Manual data entry and data processing eat away hours of your most valuable resource: time.
But manual processing is not just time-consuming. It also comes at an opportunity cost. Every minute spent on repetitive, mind-numbing, and soul-crushing tasks eats away from the time your workers could be working on productive, creative, and revenue-generating tasks.
Automatic data processing systems win back the wasted time and give you and your workers time to focus on what matters: growing your business.
To err is human. And when working with data, we tend to make errors. Sometimes we are tired, sometimes we are distracted, and sometimes our head is just not into it.
Machines make fewer errors.
That is not to say, they never make a mistake. But the mistake is a predictable consequence of wrong programming and can be quickly detected (more on this below), and amended, so fewer expensive mistakes happen in the future.
ADP can be used to automate the evaluation of your data integrity and quality. If there is something wrong with data, you can either send an automated message to a human so they can check it, or decide to discard data because it is corrupted.
Implementing automated data quality checks increases the overall data integrity and it also increases trust in data for better decision-making.
Where there is data, there is data management.
Data compliance laws change all the time. The regulation surrounding what we do with data has been increasing in its demands.
From stricter privacy rules to higher fines for violating data regulations, it is hard to keep track of what your workers are doing with data and if they follow data regulations.
If you rely on manual processes, you can quickly make mistakes that can put a dent in your bottom line (fines) or even prevent you from working (personal data breaches can allow authorities to seize your assets).
Data automation tools can make sure you collect, transform, save, and move data following regulatory compliance.
Big data and machine learning can help you stay ahead of your competition. By using artificial intelligence to automate your reporting, anomaly detection, and recommender systems, you can build products with data that have an edge over your competitors.
How to unlock all these advantages of ADP?
To get ADP benefits, use data automation tools. These software solutions can be found under different search criteria:
Or pick a single tool that does all the above and more, like Keboola.
Keboola is a Data Stack and a Service platform that joins all the functionality above in a single user-friendly solution:
Automatically collect data from hundreds of sources with Keboola’s Extractors.
And multiple other features!
Try Keboola yourself, it is free (no credit card required).
Or get inspired by data automation stories, like How you can automate marketing reports, How we automated personalized communication with clients at scale, or How we automated invoicing.
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