10 Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
While it might seem like the global businesses are fully automated, 53 percent of businesses are just starting to automate and 78 percent of companies are looking for an opportunity to increase investment in RPA in the future. So, why automate your business processes? Is RPA just another buzzword and over-hyped term?
Robotic process automation (RPA) replaces manual work with automated processes and saves time and money. However, RPA goes deeper into the business structure, revealing and removing bottlenecks, allowing employees to focus on value-added activities.
Let us review the main benefits a business can gain from process automation.
Cost Optimization
Routine processes can make up the majority of business activity in a company, but they do not provide value to the customers. While the staff spends time on daily routines, the company loses potential profits.
Robotic process automation passes the main part of everyday processes to machines. In this way, RPA saves money by removing a lot of wasted time for your employees, allowing them to focus on the activities that bring maximum value.
Staff Optimization
Frequently, the business needs the rock-star specialist to push it to the next level, but the budget does not allow for hiring high-paid professionals. It is not obvious, but RPA can help with this.
It can happen that some employees will have nothing to do after the process automation.
A business owner can reduce the number of low-level paid wages and hire different roles that will make a larger impact on the business.
Time Savings
Automated processes release time for employees. With less workload, they can rethink their way of working and work smarter not harder. They can focus on the tasks and processes that require critical thinking, creativity, and other non-automatable qualities. Above all, it decreases the risk of employees burning out, leading to staff turnover.
Higher productivity
Moving from one RPA benefit to another, we come to higher human productivity from routine process automation. The repetitive tasks are automated, so the employers can do more value-added work.
At the same time, robots can perform routine tasks faster and longer than a human being. This win-win situation means more production and less wasted time.
Productivity Paradox and RPA
The productivity paradox is a new phenomenon of the technological era. A business introduces more technology to improve the processes but gets the opposite effect. All processes slow down because people spend time learning new applications, navigating, switching between apps, and so on. It means the technology is poorly integrated, and RPA can solve this paradox.
Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Nobody likes boring work. When RPA removes repetitive, time-consuming and monotonous tasks from the daily routine, it raises morale in the workforce. People feel like management cares about them, allowing them to focus on their creative tasks. They have fewer reasons to leave the company.
Data Processing Efficiency
Automated processes are usually more effective than manual ones. We’ll provide several metrics that can be used to evaluate the data processing quality and RPA impact.
Improved Data Collection and Analysis
Automated data collection allows for collecting clearer and more detailed data regarding the business processes in the company, immediately revealing bottlenecks and slow areas with the reporting tools.
Faster Data Processing
RPA can shorten the time required for data processing. As a result, more transactions will be processed than before. Also, quick data processing improves the customer experience with a shorter response time.
Improved Data Accuracy
Manual data entry and processing result in numerous errors. RPA decreases the number of human errors to almost zero and removes the data cleansing stage from the process.
24\7 Operations
For international companies that operate in different time zones with a huge gap, setting up interaction and shared work for the teams is a real problem. RPA allows for effective work at any time and improves internal and external operations. As a rule, no more than 20 percent of the process needs human attention.
No More Paper-based Processes
Paper-based processes are a great blocker for RPA and company development in general. Besides, they are not environment-friendly. If a business eliminates or minimizes paper use within the organization, it becomes greener and saves both time and money.
Better Standardization
In the technology sector, standards can mandate the quality and consistency of technologies and ensure their compatibility, interoperability, and safety. However, with a large share of manual work, it is difficult to stick to some standards. Different employees often perform the same processes in different ways.
Robotic process automation creates a path for each automated process to follow the same steps to complete tasks. In this way, a business can standardize processes, achieve consistent results, and increase transparency across the organization.
Compliance
Compliance means rules. Compliance can consist of laws, regulations, standards, guidelines, requirements, and so on. With every new development stage, a business faces the need to meet more and more regulatory standards.
In the previous paragraph, we mentioned better standardization thanks to RPA. Regulatory compliance achievement is the next step. After setting up the internal standards and control over processes, it will be easier to meet the external regulations.
Customer Satisfaction
With RPA, the response to a customer’s letter takes several minutes, not an hour. Customers respect businesses that can respond quickly.
Quick responses to customer’s requests improve your company’s reputation among your audience through positive word-of-mouth and stronger online reviews.
Scalability
Fine-tuned, well-orchestrated business processes are easily scalable. So RPA can scale up and down together with the company. It is very helpful for growing companies and businesses with seasonal peaks.
Which Business Process Can Be Automated
Each ruled-based and repetitive business process can be automated. Here is a short list of the common processes that exist in almost any company, and can be automated easily and quickly.
- Document flow
- Invoicing
- Employee onboarding
- Data entry, cleaning, and deletion
- Transaction monitoring
- Screening against PEPs and sanction lists
- And many other processes.
A company needs to define repetitive tasks and set business goals. This may result in you wanting automation. A business will then need to find the RPA solution to implement and specialists who will implement it.
A company must then prepare a management workforce to monitor and control RPA in the company. Finally, it is necessary to set up mechanisms for performance monitoring and tracking.
If it sounds complicated to you, do not worry. Ginkgo Ukraine provides RPA for small and medium businesses, so contact us if you need a demo call and a quote.