It can be pretty eye-opening just how many documents are processed within a typical business…

Think of the volume of invoices, purchase orders, customer orders, customer confirmations and more that are processed daily – and each one of those documents can require multiple actions to be performed across multiple systems.  This is very often done manually by staff.

For some very small businesses, a manual way of processing documents is sufficient.  However, as the business grows, the staff get busier and usually find they are doing these mundane tasks day-in, day-out.  Your staff are wasting their abilities on these sorts of jobs – they quickly feel underwhelmed and error rates start to rise, eventually costing the business time and bringing customer dissatisfaction. 

What if someone told you that you could continue with the same business processes you’re used to performing, but automatically? There is no need for a fancy, all-singing, all-dancing brand new system that does everything you would ever need.  That approach would be expensive but also needs organisation and staff training to complete – and don’t forget about a data migration (to get your old documents and data onto your new system).  

RPA (robotic process automation) is the bridge between your old processes and your new and improved ones.  Its bespoke service integrates with your systems, but in the same way Julie in Accounts (let’s use Julie as an example here) did, but better. 

RPA introduces an improved service:
• Faster
• The ability to work 24/7
• More accurate with the use of quality checks
• More reliable
• And provides you with new Business Insights

A standard RPA bot usually performs the same amount of tasks 3-5 full-time employees would.  So now the business is getting more out of their outgoings and Julie is free from her day-to-day struggle of copying and pasting, checking things off in multiple systems and matching documents together.  The business now has Julie back to do more value-added tasks such as customer service or monitoring the insights that the automation brings.  Pass and fail percentages, average invoice to pay duration, up-to-date financial records – this is the kind of MI insights a business can expect, improve and grow upon.  

RPA can impact a business significantly by enhancing every level of employee’s job, allowing the business to cut costs and grow.  Just by automating some documents – that’s pretty amazing.

Does this blog resonate for you? Get in touch to discuss and we would love to help you.

John and the team at Cognitive Flow