Automation is quickly becoming an integral piece of many organization’s core business operations. To stay competitive in today’s complex technology environment, enterprises are relying heavily on workload automation and job scheduling software to streamline operations and connect disparate systems in their IT environments. However, determining the ROI of workload automation has been a challenge for many organizations.
This past year, Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the ROI that can be realized from implementing ActiveBatch IT Automation. Forrester conducted the single company analysis with ActiveBatch customer, Statkraft, Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy. This study provides a framework that illustrates the potential risks, benefits, and costs associated with workload automation and job scheduling.
Today, I want to share the results of the study and provide a use case for how energy companies like Statkraft can utilize and benefit from IT Automation.
Energy companies like Statkraft are largely affected by weather conditions. Rain, snow, and rain have a major impact on supply, demand, and production of renewable energy. Because of this, Statkraft relies heavily on predictive and historical analytics to run the background processes that model the way that potential weather may impact energy prices. Tracking weather data manually can be complicated and time consuming, and IT automation provides a simpler way to integrate this information and provide better forecasts of the energy market.
Most energy companies have various ways of modeling weather impacts and performing price forecasting. Companies can perform manual processes, develop in-house solutions, or turn to specialized software products.
Prior to ActiveBatch, Statkraft did not have an enterprise workload automation solution in place. For Statkraft and many other organizations, this approach becomes unsustainable. Manually running processes or even developing in-house solutions is very time and labor intensive, leaving IT staff constantly working on maintenance rather than innovation.
Statkraft decided to look into an IT automation solution to gain back time and improve operational efficiency. Statkraft needed an IT automation solution that could connect to a wide variety of applications, provide an easy-to-use interface and offer strong historical and predictive analytics to remain as a strong competitor in the European energy market.
Statkraft now uses ActiveBatch to collect and compile data to model impacts on the energy market based on weather data such as precipitation, wind, and sun. This, along with Statkraft’s analytics and business expertise on energy consumption and pricing, allows Statkraft to better forecast demand and pricing with significantly less resources.
With automation, they are able to quickly and simply build workflows without the need for custom scripts or code, they also have estimated that they could save an hour of follow up time post job failure due to extensive Integrated Jobs Library and built in triggers and alerts.
With ActiveBatch, Statkraft achieved the following high-level goals:
- Schedule prebuilt jobs for automated execution
- Automate workloads related to business processes
- Expand footprint into other geographies to replace less stable, internally developed tools
- Reallocate resources as available and scale business operations with flexibility
