A question that is highly relevant these days, when confronted with the economic aftermath of the COVID pandemic, is how can businesses survive and even flourish during periods of recession. There are definitely things that we can learn from the past economic turning point.
If we have a look at the financial analysis of Harvard Business Review about the effects of the 2008 economic crisis, we learn that some companies managed to outperform their competitors by 10% in terms of profits growth and sales.
How did they do that? They focused on improving operational efficiency, and reduced costs by attempting to perform the business processes better, faster, and cheaper. Such strategies make it 37% more likely that companies thrive during difficult times. And since leveraging RPA is tantamount to increased operational efficiency, it is natural to pursue the idea that automation can help businesses to fare better during economic crises.
This is why we put together a robotic process automation cheat sheet, which helps you make the most rational moves for meeting your economic standards during these difficult times. If you’re from Australia, you might also benefit from downloading our whitepaper — we interviewed 2000+ leaders about how they’re leveraging automation.
If you’re considering implementation for your company, this RPA cheat sheet is going to walk you through everything you need to know (e.g., benefits, generic use cases, etc.) in order to make it operative and successful.
How can RPA benefit your company?
We define RPA as “a useful tool (i.e., including software and services) for maximally efficient use of a company’s available resources”. The benefits of RPA are noticeable across a large area of functional domains of your company.
Overall benefits. Working side by side with software robots brings about improved business results (mainly because of the revenue leakage reduction and improved accuracy), and a significant reduction of wage costs. Additionally, it is fast and easy to implement, yet customisable to serve your own, specific needs; this adds to the weight of the above mentioned advantages.
Analytics. Bots minimise the rate of error, and, as a result, data quality is much higher. Your analyses thus become more trustworthy, and are more likely to yield practical benefits (e.g., accurate risk estimations). By interaction with legacy systems, RPA permits use of data that would be too labour-intensive for manual extraction. Reports automation allows the staff to focus on more sophisticated analyses.
Customer satisfaction. Error reduction is among the top benefits of RPA technology, according to a survey commissioned by UiPath. This view is based at least in part on knowing that high error rates are a major source of dissatisfaction for your customers. Bots’ faster service at entering forms into systems or copying data between systems can also improve customer satisfaction, and thus, make them more willing to keep working with you.
Human resources. Because software robots remove burdensome, tiring, tedious activities from your employees’ shoulders, RPA enables increased staff satisfaction. The employees also feel more empowered, in particular by no code RPA solutions. Since rumours do spread, this will make your company more attractive, which will facilitate hiring and thereby reduce hiring costs.
IT. RPA enables business users to automate their processes themselves, which means that you can expect less small automation requests for the technology unit. The reduced workload allows the IT team to focus on more challenging technology problems and to better serve all the other departments of your company.
Compliance. Software robots reduce human contact with sensitive data, which has a great impact on decreasing the risk of fraud and compliance issues. The maintenance of the audit trail allows detailed audit whenever problems arise.
RPA use cases that you can implement in your company
This is a list of the industry sectors with processes amenable to automation. We invite you to read the respective articles in order to improve your understanding of what you can do by means of automated processes more efficiently than you can do with human employees.
- Cross-industry application areas, or processes that most companies deal with, irrespective of the industry sector
- Finance
- Telecom
- Healthcare
- Retail
- Public sector
- Banking
- Insurance
- Media
- Manufacturing
- Hospitality
- HR
- Logistics
- Pharma
- Ports
How to find out if you’re ready to implement RPA
Frank Casale, founder and CEO of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPA AI), said that the presumed ease of implementation is the biggest misconception about RPA. This is why, in order to maximise the likelihood of a successful RPA implementation, our robotic process automation cheat sheet suggests that you thoroughly and realistically evaluate if your company is good to go on the automation journey.
The first thing to do is to know exactly both the good and the bad of your way of doing business. Start by picking those departments that constantly underperform and try to spot the causes, and identify communication bottlenecks between departments. Other factors that influence your company’s readiness for automation are the stability of your business processes, the amount of manual tasks in the workflow, or your employees’ level of job satisfaction.
