It has been a strange time for businesses and a real struggle for all industries…

I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in our lifetime and given that we can expect difficult times to continue for some time, we wanted to outline how RPA (robotic process automation) is being used by companies to allow them to continue to operate through the support of automation.  Without some level of automation support, many businesses will just not be able to cope with their workloads, on what for many of us, are greatly reduced staff numbers.

Amongst businesses, we typically find that they have heard of RPA, but don’t know how to begin to adopt an RPA strategy.  There are also often initial concerns that RPA may eliminate jobs or could be costly.  But there are many positives to introducing RPA to your business, and we wanted to highlight these to you to help you in your thought process:

1. RPA improves employee productivity

Especially in times of overload – your processes may be starting to creak, you haven’t got enough heads to manage, staff are stressed and too busy to cope.  RPA alleviates this stress.  You engage with new, machine-like staff (RPA robots) to, not replace jobs, but to improve the quality of their current jobs and ultimately employee performance.

Here’s an example:

BEFORE RPA

A part of Sandra’s job is to match statements coming in from suppliers to a customer booking – check all details are correct including customer names, dates, and prices.  Once these are matched, she will confirm on her internal system so the customer documents can be sent out.  Sandra realised that she was matching these documents more often than not, especially in peak periods, but it was hard to keep track of cases that didn’t match, which resulted in her sending customer documents later than planned.

RPA’S INPUT

The RPA robot automatically waits to receive the supplier statement, finds the correct booking, matches the details, and immediately sends documents to the customer if the details are correct.  If the documents don’t match, they inform Sandra that some manual input would be needed from her such as speaking to the supplier.

RESULT

Sandra can continue with her important daily tasks, and only deal with the exceptions when the documents do not match.  Sandra knows she doesn’t have to give much input to the documents that do match, knowing those customers are happy and have received their documents on time.

2. RPA helps you to cope in peak periods

We all know it’s coming at some point, and when it does, we need to be ready.  Having RPA processes in place ensures that your business can scale up to what is required from your customers.  RPA enables your business to be faster in your back office, with quality checks in place so fewer errors will happen when more bookings are coming in.  You may well have a list of operational inefficiencies that are currently problematic, and now is the best time to tackle these so you’re fully prepared for a brighter and busier future.  It’s a decision to be made that you will not regret – and will bring peace of mind for you.

3. RPA will give you the most rewarding return on investment

Not only does investing in some RPA development save you money, it’s rewarding in so many other ways.  Fewer errors, innovation in the business, quality compliance, staff happiness, consistent processes, satisfied customers – the list really does go on.  So if you’re going to invest in anything this year, RPA should be hugely considered to provide you with the benefits straight away, and for the future of your business.

What can we do to help you?

We want to help our customers with RPA as much as possible and are offering discounted developer day rates for the first year working with us.  We are happy to review your business for FREE so we can suggest any improvements that we can make quickly for you through RPA.

Join in the conversation with us and get in touch here.

John and the team at Cognitive Flow