Data Automation: Why You Need It in 2023

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, data is the lifeblood of businesses. Whether you're a small start-up or an established enterprise, your ability to collect, process, and manage insights determines your competitive edge. However, manual handling of such a sheer volume of data can be tedious and time-consuming. This is where data automation steps in as a game-changer.

It revolutionizes the way you eliminate routine tasks and allows your team to focus on what truly matters. Without minimal manual intervention, this technology can significantly improve your operational efficiency, reduce cost, and even enhance customer experience.

This blog will discuss everything you need to know about data automation techniques or tools with real-time examples for you to see how businesses actually benefit from incorporating it.

Data automation the process of leveraging software to automate data-related activities. It is the process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing information via advanced technologies such as natural language processing, machine learning, etc.

With robust algorithms, businesses optimize their repetitive tasks speedily without direct human involvement. It saves employee productivity for other valuable matters and seamlessly manages the overall operations of an organization. 57% of organizations want to employ automation to increase their employee productivity and performance.

Research shows that 76% of businesses deploy data automation to automate and standardize everyday workflows. It offers significant benefits to startups as well as large corporations in various ways.

Improved Efficiency and Accuracy

Workflow efficiency and accuracy are indispensable when dealing with large volumes of data, complex calculations, or repetitive tasks. For that, data automation is truly an unsung hero. This technology eradicates the need for manual data collection, entry, and processing. Thus, it alleviates the likelihood of human errors, such as typos or data duplications.

Likewise, the data digitalization process persistently follows predefined standards and uses advanced algorithms that ensure accuracy. So, it streamlines your workflows and offers you reliable data for well-informed decisions.

Time Savings

Automation performs data-related activities much more quickly than manual processes. It can manage massive amount of documents or data and perform calculations in seconds or minutes. Leveraging robotic tools economizes the employee's precious time and energy and redirects them toward higher-value tasks. This then allows employees to spend time on tasks with more strategic value instead of mundane and repetitive tasks.

Cost Reduction

Businesses may mitigate labor costs associated with task management by automating data workflows. This is particularly beneficial for projects that require significant manpower.

Moreover, by employing machine learning or AI, companies can alleviate the risk of duplicate entries and other manual mistakes. In this way, it curbs the expenses associated with data error detection, correction, and reconciliation.

Real-Time Insights

Instead of relying on conventional data, the acquisition of data automation allows you to stay up to date with the latest insights. It can offer real-time processing and reporting that enables organizations to make data-driven decisions much faster.

This is extremely crucial for fast-paced industries requiring speedy response to market changes and emerging trends.

Data automation works by deploying tools, software, and predefined sets of algorithms to execute data-related processes without human interference. Here's a detailed overview of how data automation works:

Data Collection

The data automation process begins with gathering the required data from various internal or external sources. These data sources may include relational or non-relational databases, spreadsheets, third-party apps, cloud-based warehouses, APIs, and more. To extract data from these sources, many integration tools and platforms are employed by this automated system.

Data Cleaning & Processing

Once data is extracted, it may be cleansed and processed to a desired format to ensure its quality and consistency. For that, the automation tools can apply predefined rules to transform, clean, and enrich the data. This step involves eliminating unwanted characters, data duplication, or dealing with missing values to ensure accuracy. It results in a standard data format that can be further analyzed.

Data Analysis and Storage

It often involves statistical analysis, data mining, or machine learning to derive significant insights from the processed data. These analytics help the organizations to make prudent decisions. Moreover, the processed data is also stored in storage systems such as databases, data warehouses, or data lakes for future use.

Monitoring and Maintaining Automation Tools

Finally, regular monitoring and maintenance of automation tools is essential for ensuring reliability, security, and efficacy. For that, you need to oversee regular updates, data pipelines, ATL pipelines, and related robotic systems to ensure that they are running smoothly. By investing in monitoring and maintenance practices, organizations can maximize the quality of data-related operations while minimizing disruptions and risks.

To streamline various aspects of data management, data automation employs significant techniques. This automated approach enhances quality, accuracy, and decision-making in businesses by reducing the aberrations in data handling. Let's get into the main components of data automation in more detail.

Data Integration

One of the indispensable data automation techniques is identifying and integrating various data sources. It may include data validation, cleaning, and ELT (extract, load, and transfer) mapping. This step ensures that the integrated data is well-formatted and then stored in a consistent and structured manner.

For data integration, there's no specific methodology. Only some components, including different data sources, master nodes, or the authorized user, need to be in contact during the process. For example, the user requests information from the master node. The server processes the user's request and integrates data from available sources. Finally, it delivers the data as a unified view to the user for further analysis.

Data Transformation

Data transformation is the art of changing the raw data into a form that is suitable for analysis. It may include data wrangling, cleaning, or combing various datasets. This technique is suitable for creating data in the most convenient format for management interpretation.

For instance, if you are handling large data volumes, transforming them into a single table saves you time or effort for the later calculations during the actual analysis process.

You might be thinking about how you can transform the data into a useful form for better analysis. For that, you can deploy systematic modeling or related approaches to ensure versatility in analysis. To begin with, you need to decide on the particular info in the dataset that needs some transformation to better align with the predefined analytical approach.

For example, if you have two databases for customer demographics and their purchase behaviors, then transforming the data means you'd be matching variables like age or income level for a joint analysis.

Data Loading

In this technique, the formatted and cleaned data is stored in the data warehouses for high accessibility. It eradicates the manual handling of large sets of data and simplifies processing-intensive analysis. The efficient data loading into the management system accelerates real-time collaboration and allows multiple employees to access the same datasets.

The best way is to load only the necessary information rather than uploading the whole data record to save processing time. Moreover, you should also avoid creating new columns during the loading process because it may require additional memory. Moreover, creating an index or lookup table that integrates every variable deployed during the analysis would be more convenient.

Data automation finds applications across various sectors and enterprises to optimize their operations. For example:

• To manage customer relations and track sales leads, the businesses deploy automated CRM platforms. They integrate machine learning tools to collect, organize, and analyze customer data to help the sales team close their deals.
• It plays a crucial role in targeted marketing by automating data extraction from receipts for consumer behavior analysis. About 43% of the respondents in a survey reported that the most important benefit of marketing automation was to improve the customer experience. Moreover, by integration data automation with loyalty app, businesses can improve their user experience by allowing their customers to easily accumulate loyalty points via uploading their shopping receipts.
• In e-commerce, data automation can lead to more personalized product recommendations, efficient inventory management, and better pricing strategies to enhance the customer shopping experience.
• HR departments are often flooded with hundreds of thousands of resume. With a data automation tool like resume parser. the HR department can be free from manual data entry and improve HR processes like applicant tracking, employee onboarding, and payroll management.
• An individual is said to generate more than one million gigabytes of health-related data; however healthcare organizations are full of unstructured data that have to be manually transcribed or organized into usable formats. Healthcare organizations can deploy data automation to provide better patient care and alleviate administrative burdens.

As good as it sounds, operating automated tools still comes with some challenges. For example:

Technical Complexity

Managing the automation infrastructure can be complex for the non-technical users. The businesses may require data analysts or IT staff that have the expertise and technical skills to operate the automated software. A lack of data skills can be a barrier to investing in data automation systems.

Scalability Issues

As data volumes increase, automation systems must scale to accommodate the increased workload. It can be challenging and costly to implement effectively. Ensuring that automated processes stay responsive as data scales up is an ongoing challenge.

Change Management

Employees may resist automation initiatives due to fear of job displacement or role changes. Effective change management and training programs are essential to address these concerns.

FormX is a low-code, intelligent data extraction solution that can not only convert various documents into structured data but more important be easily integrated with various software to form a completely automated data pipeline. By embracing this automated tool, you can transform analog data into digital structured datasets. It comes with a set of pre-built extractors, such as ID, passport, invoice, receipt, proof of address, and more, for businesses to start automating data extraction with minimal setup. Moreover, FormX can also automatically classify your documents into different categories and determine which extractors to use for data extraction.

Contact us today or sign up for a free trial to see how you can easily have a automated data pipeline set up with FormX.