Automation = Efficient Growth

As the era of cheap capital ends, growth-at-any-cost is no longer a blueprint for success. Instead, business leaders everywhere are shifting their focus to efficient growth strategies.

Analytics automation is at the forefront of this strategic shift. Time and again, automation has helped businesses not just survive tough times but turn risk into opportunity. And today, as digitization pulls more and more organizations into a data-driven world, automated decision making based on data has become the critical muscle that companies of all sizes must develop.

Yet, there is very little knowledge of what analytics automation is and how best to develop core strengths around it. This blog looks at the impact of various automation technologies on business growth and why analytics automation is the next frontier.

Automation = Efficient Growth

Our story begins in 1908 when the Ford Motor Company invented first-of-a-kind automated car assembly lines, bringing the cost of producing cars from $950 to $300. That revolutionary technology made it possible to make cars both affordable and mass-produced.

This was the first large-scale use of automation technology to reduce business costs and grow the market simultaneously – i.e., efficient growth.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and automation technologies took on various aspects of business process automation.

As the internet took off and brands began selling to national and global customers, managing sales activities at scale meant the difference between success and failure. Businesses invested billions of dollars in CRM and sales force automation technologies to automatically track and manage contacts, leads, and opportunities.

Salesforce led this shift with its cloud-native CRM. Suddenly, CRM automation was no longer just for the world’s biggest enterprises that could afford expensive and custom solutions that their IT teams had to manage. Now, companies big and small could benefit. And benefit they did, in yet another example of automation enabling efficient growth.

Shortly after, data entry automation burst onto the scene. Companies like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism specialize in automating data entry processes. These new platforms enabled businesses to automate invoice processing, employee onboarding, financial reporting, and many other similar manual data entry processes and have driven increases in employee productivity, operational efficiency, business growth, and more.

More recently, task automation software like Zapier, Monday.com, Asana, and Trello have come to life and increased employee productivity. Document automation platforms like Coda, Miro, and Airtable have accelerated teamwork, allowing teams to execute 20% faster.

No matter what industries or jobs it touches – from manufacturing and food to sales and marketing, process management, and document management – automation has been driving efficient growth across all.

Analysts Are at the Next Frontier of Automation

Automation technologies reach an inflection point when repetitive manual tasks limit business agility, efficiency, and growth. Here are some of the telltale signs of the need for automation tech:

1. Demands on your team far exceed your team’s capacity
2. Your oversubscribed team bottlenecks other teams
3. Adding more capacity to your team is not solving the problem

This is when businesses look for radical alternatives like automation.

Analytics has reached this inflection point. The demand for actionable insights is growing exponentially as digital transformation matures. Companies of all sizes have significantly invested in data infrastructure and teams in the last few years. Still, they cannot keep up with the data requests from business teams.

That’s because the last mile of analytics is still manual. Analysts are stuck manually pulling data from multiple systems and running analytics in spreadsheets or SQL. Studies show that analysts spend a large share of their time — 45% on average — on data prep and other repetitive tasks. That means almost half of your expensive human capital is wasted on mundane activities.

What could your business accomplish if your analytics team didn’t have to do that anymore? And instead, can they spend their time generating new insights for your business? Imagine having your team 10x more productive, turning around data requests at lightning-fast speed, and still being able to go home early! That is no longer a dream — it is now possible with analytics automation technologies.