by Phil Swainson | 1 December, 2025
In business and IT operations, the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” often slows progress. Yet, even systems that seem to work can conceal inefficiencies that cost time, money, and competitive advantage over the long term. Taking a proactive stance on automation — even when processes appear functional — unlocks real opportunities for improved performance.
This blog explores how we approached a complex automation engagement with a longstanding manufacturing company — and how deep analysis and carefully targeted automation delivered transformative results.
Why Challenge the Status Quo?
It’s tempting to leave existing workflows untouched — particularly when teams are meeting key service targets. However, subtle inefficiencies often compound over time:
- Manual work accumulates
- Tickets become noisy and redundant
- Key data fails to propagate across systems
- Escalations take longer than they should
These hidden issues make networks harder to manage and teams less responsive — even if they appear productive.
Our Approach: Evaluate Before Automating
To get the most value from automation, we began by evaluating ten existing workflows with four clear goals:
- Identify key stakeholders involved
- Understand current workflow logic
- Quantify time and effort for each task
- Assess automation feasibility and return on investment
The workflows fell into three broad strategic categories:
1. Mitigating Ticket Proliferation in IT Service Management
The company’s Network Operations Centre (NOC) was overwhelmed — ingesting 10,000+ tickets per month, approximately 14 per hour around the clock. Nearly 70% were duplicates or similar events, overwhelming analysts and consuming huge amounts of triage time.
Despite existing automation, the process was inefficient. A major issue was the ticketing pipeline: alarms were sent broadly to downstream systems before root cause was determined — creating noise rather than clarity.
What Changed: We shifted intelligence upstream, letting the more capable tool calculate root cause and filter what truly mattered before anything was forwarded. This significantly reduced redundant alerts and simplified downstream processing.
Outcome: More focused alerting and a 77% reduction in monthly ticket volume — from 10,000 down to around 2,300 — freeing teams to focus on resolution rather than duplication.
2. Automating Manual Tasks Across Systems
Manual data entry across disconnected systems was slow and error-prone — from onboarding new devices to data enrichment between order systems, CMDB, ITSM and network monitoring.
Solution: Using TOTUUS® as a central data framework with API connectors, we:
- Configured push connectors to securely receive CMDB changes
- Matched and enriched data with unique identifiers
- Automated propagation to all connected systems
- Ensured authoritative data sources controlled updates
This ensured data was entered once, at the source, and routed and augmented automatically to all systems that needed it — eliminating double/triple entry and data mismatches.
Benefit: Faster onboarding, fewer errors, and data harmonised across ITSM, NMS, and discovery platforms.
3. Efficient Ticket Generation for Firewall Threats
Threat detection systems generate critical security events — but if tickets are raised with insufficient context, responders waste time re-enriching information manually.
Our next phase focuses on automating detailed ticket creation for the NG Firewall platform by embedding enriched context into the initial event — enabling faster, smarter triage and response.
Key Takeaways
- Automation isn’t just for broken systems — even “working” workflows can consume disproportionate time and resources when inefficiencies are baked in.
- Begin with evaluation, not scripts — understanding process and stakeholder pain points is the foundation for effective automation.
- Data consistency unlocks results — integrated, harmonised data flows reduce errors, improve visibility and speed decision-making.
- Intelligence at the source matters — letting smarter systems do what they do best reduces noise and manual effort downstream.
Want to Automate With Confidence?
Whether you’re drowning in tickets or looking to harmonise systems across your IT estate, automation doesn’t have to be disruptive — it can be transformative.
Talk to us about your automation roadmap — we’d love to help you identify high-value opportunities and deliver measurable efficiency gains.
