Holistic automation increases capacity, streamlines customer interactions, and transforms manual work into more meaningful opportunities.
As businesses evolve, it becomes harder to maintain efficiency and control. But robotic process automation (RPA) can help. RPA automates repetitive rule-based business processes, freeing up staff to focus on the high-value work that can deliver greater value. Many organizations also consider RPA as a first step in their path to intelligent automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence, that can be later enriched to make judgements.
RPA is a big positive for businesses. It delivers benefits immediately, such as cost reduction and faster delivery speed. As it spreads across the organization, RPA improves business outcomes such as customer satisfaction and boosts competitiveness. By executing the mundane processes, RPA provides humans more opportunities to solve problems, optimize processes, and perform analysis. This drives employee engagement and retention of talented workers.
Key things to remember when implementing RPA:
- Manage expectations – running RPA for quick-wins vs running at scale across the organization
- Define immediate business impact – measuring ROI or cost reduction may take time but using chatbots for rapid engagement with customers can drive customer satisfaction immediately
- Engage IT from the beginning – having technical resources onboard from the beginning will help to navigate common roadblocks such as firewalls or Single-Sign-On integration
- Establish project governance – assign accountability, develop guidelines to ensure standardized implementation and monitoring
- Change management – developing a proper communication plan especially in the areas where RPA bots will be assisting humans to execute complete or partial processes. This will help to minimize ambiguity and promote understanding of how the freed up time of human can be better applied to more valuable tasks
Checklist to identify suitable processes for RPA:
- Should be rule-based without the need of human judgement
- Should be invoked by a digital trigger and run on data
- Should be operational and stable
- The more the volume of transactions, the better
- For Proof-Of-Concept, it is critical that the process uses key systems such as ERP, CRM, HR