Top 10+ WLA Use Cases in IT, HR & Accounting in 2024

When asked the question: “Which automation technologies do you believe are the key enablers of enterprise digital transformation?” 47% of business and IT leaders agreed that workload automation (WLA) would be their top choice, followed by robotic process automation (RPA).

Workload automation (WLA) tools are a type of software that automates business processes by scheduling, executing, and logging tasks across different business platforms. They are used to automate both back office workflows as well as some customer-facing tasks in order to improve tech effectiveness, data management and manage automation costs by aggregating automation tasks under one tool.

In this article, we will explore the top use cases of workload automation among different business functions and the benefits of automation to businesses:

IT processes

1. ETLs

Extract, transform, and load (ETL) process is the repetitive procedure of copying data from one or multiple sources to a designated system that represents the data differently from the source or in a different context than the source. WLA tools can:

• automate data updates at specific times or triggering events
• load data from one platform to another
• automate triggering events (e.g. file completions) before starting dependent workflows to ensure reliable data

Benefits to business:

Leveraging workload automation for automating ETL processes reduces time spent on repetitive data processes and minimizes human intervention, reducing subsequent data errors.

2. Data warehouse management

ETL processes are the first steps of data warehouse management. For an end-to-end automation approach, WLA software can:

• monitor processes and automate status-checking
• audit and log ETL events for compliance purposes
• notify users of failures and errors
• automate reporting of data warehouses

Benefits to business:

Automating data warehouse management via workload automation tools increases the transparency of compliance reports as all processes are recorded and have a detailed audit trail.

3. FTPs

File transfer protocols (FTP) are communication protocols used to transfer files from one server to another. Typically, running FTPs does not notify users of file delivery or failure, and requires manual decluttering of files once they are transferred. WLA software can automate FTPs at scheduled times or triggering events, monitor file transfers, log events, and notify users of delivery or failure. In addition, workload automation tools have the feature of restarting an event in case of failure. Therefore, if an FTP fails, the WLA will retrigger the FTP workflow until a successful transfer notification can be sent to the user.

Benefits to business:

Automating FTPs with workload automation software reduces the time spent on recurring, high-volume file transfers and enables the monitoring of file transfers both on premise and on the cloud.

Other IT processes suitable for WLA

According to a 2018 survey, users believed that WLA software was a good candidate to automate:

4. Workflow lifecycle management
5. Server/agent additions in on-premise environments: While some systems auto scale, auto scaling can be hard to configure within each environment. Building auto scaling mechanisms with WLA can save teams time and help them manage auto scaling in a more centralized manner
6. Cloud management/provisioning: For cloud management, IT teams can rely on workload automation tools to manage the provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines on multiple clouds from a single platform
7. KPI monitoring: Automating KPI monitoring and displaying results in self-service dashboards
8. SLA management: Alerting (e.g. via emails, slack, text messages) when KPIs fall under the levels in SLAs
9. Critical path monitoring: Every time a predecessor of a critical job in a path starts delaying, the scheduler automatically recalculates the critical path, enabling users to monitor the path more accurately
10. Broad IT automation: There are too many repetitive IT processes to automate. Automating multiple platforms (e.g. multiple cloud or on-prem environments) via a single automation platform allows teams to save on automation effort and easily maintain their automation code.

Check out other IT automation software and its use cases to improve your IT processes, such as:

• Batch scheduling software
• Data warehouse software
• Enterprise Job scheduling software

HR processes

11. Payrolls

Payroll calculation is a repetitive process that relies on large data from different resources (e.g. HR and ERP data). WLA tools enable users to create workflows that rely on relevant updated data from different platforms and sequence events and interdependencies to ensure accurate payroll calculation.

Benefits to business:

Leveraging automation solutions to automate payroll processes:

• Reduces payroll errors
• Creates a comprehensive and transparent audit trail
• Protects privileged employee data

12. Onboarding

Automating new hire onboarding can minimize the time spent by the IT team to create device logins, email addresses, or passwords, and to add them to work groups, calendars, and mail distribution lists. See figure 1.

Figure 1. Workflow of employee onboarding

Benefits to business:

Automating onboarding using WLA can:

• Reduce the time spent on repetitive and scripted tasks
• Minimize breaches or unauthorized access
• Eliminate duplicates within an employee’s archive.

Explore employee onboarding automation in more details.

Accounting processes

13. P&L creation

Workload automation tools leverage scheduling and triggering to convert accounting and trading data, pull financial data from different sources (finance, HR, procurement, etc.), and distribute P&L reports to employees and clients.

14. Billing

Using a WLA tool, users can create a workflow that pulls financial data from designated platforms, validates source files, triggers invoice creation processes, and updates journal entry datasets on the relevant platforms.

Benefits to business:

Leveraging workload automation for automating accounting processes enhances the quality of generated reports by:

• Minimizing data errors
• Limiting time spent on report generation
• Ensuring that employees meet deadlines (e.g. complete repetitive tasks, notify users of data errors and task completion.)

Explore the top 5 finance workload automation benefits and use cases in more detail.

How can AI improve WLA?

Workload automation tools create a centralized automation platform. Currently, none of the tools that we analyzed rely on AI. Humans create automation rules that WLA systems perform. However, in the future, we expect vendors to start leveraging AI capabilities to provide several benefits to businesses and customers:

• Analytics: Leveraging analytics on a centralized data warehouse can help identify business gaps, improve decision-making, and optimize the overall business operation.
  • Forecasting: Forecasting tasks and estimating any implications on the company (e.g. there will be significantly more cloud computing costs this month because of significantly more data storage in an expensive storage medium)
  • Pattern recognition: Additionally, machine learning algorithms can detect trends and patterns in event logs for optimizing scheduling and triggering events according to daily/weekly/monthly patterns.
• OCR and image recognition: Implementing optical character recognition (OCR) and image recognition will enable the WLA tool to perform ETL and data updates and management on both structured and unstructured formats of data.
• Conversational AI: Chatbot or digital assistants can guide users through creating workflows and scheduling tasks. They can also notify users of errors and lead them to bugs, as well as pull event logs for review or auditing purposes.

To explore which tasks can be automated using AI, feel free to read our in-depth article AI in Automation.

Further reading

It is important to understand that workload automation is one of many automation practices that businesses are trying to implement; other examples, while being similar to WLA, include Enterprise Job Scheduling.

For a visual summary of the automation landscape, feel free to check out our automation market map and top workload automation vendors which we are constantly updating by adding new automation areas and vendors.

If you feel like your business could benefit from WLA solutions, feel free to scroll through our data-driven list of workload automation tools to find the right vendor for you, and we can also guide you through the process: