What’s the ROI of data automation?

$500k, and that’s just for starters.

In this day and age, most organizations have ever-growing data volumes and data sources in different formats, likely filled with duplicates and errors. It is all-but impossible to ‘manually’ derive value from this data, even if data engineers use an extract, transform, and load (aka ETL) tool. So, what, then, is the ROI of data automation?

Direct and opportunity costs

An enterprise-grade data automation platform enables you to be up and running with clean, trustworthy, real-time data in a matter of weeks, instead of the months or even years required with a custom ETL engineering project. When it comes to data aggregation, not only do you want to build consistent data streams and automated alerting and monitoring, but you want access to this as soon as possible. But building a custom solution takes too long and is too costly.

In fact, customers have told us they can save $500k+ and at least six months of labor utilizing a data automation platform compared to trying to build it themselves. And this doesn’t factor in the maintenance and ownership costs of the manual approach to data aggregation. Additionally, there is a huge opportunity cost in not having the data available as soon as possible.

With data automation, you can make better decisions on business-critical aspects such as inventory forecasting, advertising spend, pricing, and future revenue streams, all based on factual data instead of guesswork.

Ongoing reporting costs

Once you’ve built your strategic data asset, automation can also save substantial reporting and forecasting costs on an ongoing basis. For example, one customer, a large media company, was able to stand up sell-through forecasting in one week, and a Cost per Hour ops solution in three weeks. (Sell-through forecasting is being able to figure out which streams of revenue are the most profitable and which ad campaigns bring in the most new customers.)

Data automation eliminated a previous manual bottleneck of four person days per forecast to get the information they needed. Now, they can understand the impact of pricing and packaging strategies in near-real time, and can deliver a new level of quality to their own advertisers in the form of increased audience attention and analysis.

Getting a handle on your data is more important than ever. The longer you wait, the greater the opportunity cost and lost revenue from bad guesses. The best way to get your data to work for you, rather than against you, is automation.

If you want data-driven insights in a few months – and wish to learn more about this customer – email me today: dan@switchboard-software.com.