Like many companies that utilize both high-performance employees and systems in FinOps, RevOps, and IT, Equinix—a digital infrastructure company—recognizes that the quality of daily operations would improve by reducing the overall volume of repetitive tasks.
Particular problem areas that Equinix focused on in its analysis of workflow inefficiencies included:
- Performing background checks in the onboarding process
- Ensuring employee compliance with post-pandemic, return-to-work protocols
- Reducing time spent preparing quarterly business reviews by finance, sales, and marketing teams
Saving hours in the workday by automating these manual processes is great, but Equinix wanted to see just how far they could go.
Though still in the pilot phase of a Workato-enabled intelligent automation, they’ve already discovered that more high-impact change can be made by automating decision making.
You can learn more about Equinix’s advances in intelligent automation by watching their session at Automate: “Insight-Driven Automation at Equinix”.
Moving the needle with intelligent automation
Prashant Motewar, Head of Product Management for Data & Analytics at Equinix, describes the company’s ambitious goal of transferring higher-order functions, such as analysis and decision making, off the employee’s desk through 3 use cases:
- Service ticket automations: Equinix averages 30,000 service emails a day. Rather than relying on human analysis and routing of each ticket, the company developed an API that scans each email, determines what kind of work order needs to be generated, and facilitates that transaction.
- Customer alerts using a surveillance camera: Equinix customers often install their own servers at Equinix locations all over the world. Sometimes, they’ll leave packaging at the site, which poses a risk to the structure and equipment. The surveillance cameras typically act as the conduit through which an employee observes the act and then notifies the offenders after the fact. With automated image analysis, such offenses are instantly communicated to a bot that notifies the customer to remove the package from the unauthorized area and initiates the billing of the customer.
- Deals intelligence: Through the comparison of certain data points between deals, Equinix realized it could automate the workflow for routing deals to finance. In this case, recognizing regional or historical trends allowed for intelligent approvals to be made.
Each of these use cases confirms what we already know about the value of relieving employees of mindless, manual tasks and reveals the same for the automation of decision making: it saves time, increases revenue, optimizes workflows, satisfies user preferences, and reveals useful data.
The insights gained into intelligent automation also paves the way for innovative solutions, such as a pilot that enables employees to perform tasks on Microsoft Teams.
To learn more about Equinix’s use cases and intelligent automations, you can watch their session from Automate, the #1 conference on automation.
