The Benefits a Business Automation Platform

IT Teams are Unable to Keep up with Automation Demands

When Excel-based processes graduate to 'business critical' status, it often falls to IT teams to automate them before the Excel-based workflow fails. The failure comes in two flavors: tech failure and process failure.

Tech failure is when the Excel file stops working all together. A common tech failure pattern occurs when each month new data is added to an Excel file until the file becomes so large that Excel struggles to calculate the report. An business audit analyst at a large financial institution shared recently

My Excel model relies on so much data that it takes nearly 12 hours for Excel to finish calculating. During that time, I can't use the Office suite.

On the other hand, process failure occurs when a manual workflow cannot keep up with the increased demand. For example, a Medicare agency's case management team was responsible for reconciling commission data between their internal records and the book of business provided by insurance companies. Their manual process could only reconcile 1k records per day, resulting in the company regularly being months behind the newest data.

As more and more Excel-based processes near failure, IT teams are unable to keep up with automation demands. That means more than ever companies are looking to empower business users to automate their own processes.

Empower Business Analysts to Automate their Own Business Critical Processes

A Business Automation Platform is a general platform for automating recurring reports. Crucially, the platform is not designed for any one workflow, instead, it is designed to empower analysts across the business to automate their own processes.

The benefits of automating repetitive reports with Mito and Streamlit

Build repetitive reports faster to create new capacity

Automating report generation means that what once took analysts hours can now be done in minutes. Speeding up the process frees up team members to focus on more strategic tasks that require human insight.

And because these automations can be shared across the organization, one analysts' automation can create a time-saving ripple effect and can standardize the reporting process. Shared automations mean less duplication of effort and a higher guarantee of report accuracy across departments.

Perform a code audit before production use

One of the key advantages of using a business automation platform is the ability to audit and validate the business logic before it goes into production. One common pattern is to save each automation as a new file in a git repository. When the business user clicks "Save Automation", it automatically generates a new PR in that repo for an audit team to review before making the automation available in production. These more technical auditors can look out for common errors like improper use of internal APIs, incorrect data type handling, etc.

Create shared workflow automation tools for common tasks

Building a centralized automation platform allows the IT team to focus on building report building blocks instead of trying to understand and then build full report automations. This model lets the business users focus on what they are best at – understanding the business logic of the report – and the IT team focus on what they are uniquely skilled at – navigating the company's various data sources and building infrastructure to make them accessible in the right places.

For example, one of the largest retailers in the world built a forecasting algorithm to help their more than 800 forecasters predict necessary inventory for the quarter. Instead of the IT team trying to understand the details of each forecast, they built infrastructure for the analysts to connect to the forecasting model from their new Streamlit business automation platform.

Often, automation platforms will have a "Request Utility" button in it to make it easy for business users to ask for new data sources, API end points, or other shared resources.

Building a Business Automation Platform

The structure of a business automation platform is the following:

1. Analyst uses Mito to create a new automation using the same Excel transformations that they are used to. Mito generates the equivalent Python code for every edit the user makes.
2. The app saves the Mito-generated Python code
3. When the analyst wants to rerun their automation, they select it from the list of saved automations and select a new data set to run the automation on.
4. The app automatically uses the saved Python code to rebuild the report on the new dataset.

You can follow this tutorial to build your business automation platform using Mito and Streamlit.