Extending The Time Equation: How TimeXtender Helps Businesses Save Considerable Time, Money by Automating Data Management Efforts

Time is finite.

We cannot produce more time for ourselves. We can only improve what we do with our time. This is the essence of business technology… helping us become more efficient during our workday.

Becoming more efficient is a primary objective for companies when it comes to managing the plethora of data they possess and will gather in future years. But lots of companies really struggle and lose precious time trying to figure out the best course of action to manage their data volume. As the old saying goes, “time is money,” and this business maxim has never been more true than when it comes to the management of corporate data.

Years back, when businesses started to understand the value of data, they began exploring ways to manage their valuable information. To do so, they turned to having a data warehouse built for their company. One problem: classical data warehouses were very expensive and took too long to implement. Often, once the data warehouse was finally up and running, the business needs for the organization had completely changed or the data warehouse was far from being the intended solution needed to help the company become more profitable — despite the significant investment allocated for consultants, developers and programmers.

Removing Lengthy Delays to Access Data

After the data warehouse became functional, companies expressed concern about security and privacy and exhibited caution about who could access specific data sets. This apprehension led to management requiring that users submit a job ticket to the IT department to seek permission for data access. With an approval process in place, long delays occurred, from the period at which they needed the data to the time they were actually granted permission to view the data. This became known as “the battle between IT and business.” When users were finally allowed access, many had moved on to another initiative without having the benefit of analyzing the needed data weeks back.  Similarly, users would have to put in a job ticket to make minor upgrades at their local desktop.

TimeXtender recognized these problems back in 2006. The company significantly improves the time equation by removing this approval barrier and subsequent delay by providing data democratization for business users, enabling them to have instant access to data at their point of work. But TimeXtender does much more.

TimeXtender technology also provides easy-to-use, drag and drop functions so that users can make minor modifications on their own without seeking assistance from IT. While these advancements save time and money, they help the organization become more productive from another perspective:  IT is freed from manual coding, reviewing data-access requests, and providing minor modifications; thereby empowering IT to concentrate on more strategic endeavors that will have a greater impact for the business.

Speeding Up Process to Manage Data

It has been an axiom for many years that data scientists spend as much as 80% of their workday doing data preparation – identifying, collecting, cleansing, and aggregating data. That’s a lot of hours allocated to complete these tasks, but with TimeXtender, these undertakings are simplified, automated and optimized.

Using TimeXtender, companies can easily build and manage a modern data estate up to 10 times faster than manual coding. They can implement and operate data lakes, data warehouses and data marts to then automate processes to get data ready for AI and analytics. All this can be done without assigning resources to handwrite code – achieving what is called “no-code simplicity.”

TimeXtender software also automates code generation, orchestration and version control across multiple environments, automatically delivers end-to-end data lineage and impact analysis, and automates generation of complete documentation from project metadata. This saves time by helping a business automate these activities and supports their efforts to become compliant in meeting government regulations.

Eliminating Wasted Hours on Numerous Tools

TimeXtender also helps businesses save time and money through its integrated toolset. Today, there are various software packages on the market that support data management, data infrastructure and a cloud deployment, but many of these technologies require multiple tools or the bundling of various vendor toolsets so that a company can manage its data systems. TimeXtender technology allows a business to accomplish all this and to build and manage their corporate data estate with only one tool. Using a single toolset translates into less hours spent on: training on how to use the various tools, keeping these tools current with its latest version release, and figuring out how to synchronize the tools together.

Maximizing Productivity with Centralized Data Estate

TimeXtender helps improve the quality of data used for reporting, analytics, machine learning, AI, and the cloud. Historically, organizational business units such as HR, finance and marketing have built their own systems within their departments so that they could have local access and control to the data needed to perform their specific business functions. This movement led to the proliferation of data silos.

Over the years, many companies have worked diligently to break down their silos. However, businesses were still left with then trying to determine how best to manage their data and provide for enterprise-data governance. TimeXtender plays a keen role for businesses in this area as its modern data estate delivers a unified data platform that becomes the centralized home for data. Within its technology is a built-in layer that enables a company to differentiate who can access what data. Having this type of centralized data estate saves more time by establishing a “single version of the truth,” which eliminates executives scheduling wasteful meetings to determine which data and which numbers are most accurate.

With greater data quality, and by permitting instant access to data, companies are inspired to make faster, more strategic business decisions, helping them reduce costs and improve revenue-generating opportunities. They’re better prepared for the cloud, instill greater clarity in reporting, more suitable for AI, more formidable for advanced analytics.

Businesses are hungry for a cost-feasible, highly efficient platform and methodology to build, deploy and manage their corporate data for the present and the future, for on-premises or the cloud. They want technology that assists them in becoming more time efficient and productive, and helps them harvest more from their data. All of these capabilities as mentioned in this article, when added up together, substantially improve or extend the equation of time. Maximizing the time equation of work is the core deliverable that TimeXtender provides to 3,300+ global customers and is crucial for one very important business reason: Because time matters.