Turning Fragmented Automation into an Enterprise Capability

Leadership at a large manufacturing organization has made automation a priority, and teams across the organization are racing to respond. But without a shared approach to where and how automation should be used, well-intentioned efforts begin pulling the organization in different directions.

Teams are responding to the technology differently, creating overlapping efforts and uncertainty among employees about what the changes mean for their work.

Sound familiar? Like many organizations introducing new technology at scale, this company faced both technical fragmentation and a mixed response from the people expected to use it.

As automation expanded across the company, departments were often developing similar solutions independently, using different tools, definitions, and processes. That fragmentation created duplicated work, conflicting information, and added burden on IT.

But the challenge wasn’t only technical. Some employees were enthusiastic about the new technology, while others worried about job security or whether they would have the support needed to learn new ways of working. Those concerns were affecting communication and collaboration across departments, making it harder to establish a consistent enterprise approach.

For the company’s automation investment to deliver value, it needed a more unified technical foundation and an approach that helped employees understand how the technology fit into their work.

The company engaged Elder Research, a MANTECH company, to bring its fragmented automation efforts into a more unified enterprise approach while helping employees understand and effectively use the technology in their day-to-day work.

Working by department, we addressed concerns about job security, the learning curve, and technology support. We helped employees understand how their jobs were changing and gave them the support needed to work effectively with the technology.

At the enterprise level, we established greater consistency across departments to ease the burden on IT. We identified overlapping efforts and moved the company toward a single source of truth for data and definitions, while streamlining the tools used to create enterprise-level assets. This reduced the need for departments to independently create variations of the same reports and helped address conflicting information across the organization.

We also helped build a system that allowed departments to evaluate requests, identify overlap, prioritize work, and build assets with a unified enterprise view. The system provided greater visibility into what was being requested, why, and how the potential impact and time savings were measured.

By combining staff education with a unified enterprise system, we reduced unaligned tool usage and eliminated data misalignment. Teams can now access consistent, reliable information more easily, simplifying critical processes including SEC reporting and financial analysis.

The organization moved from fragmented, conflicting reporting processes to a streamlined enterprise-wide system built on greater transparency and trust. Employees can now understand, adopt, and put that capability to work—helping the company turn its automation investment into operational value.