Business automation is one of the top trends across the majority of different industries. It’s certainly not just a buzzword aimed to get money out of companies – a successful robotic process automation, or RPA development, can completely reshape the various processes in your business as well as significantly improve them, together with many other factors. Here’s everything you need to know.
What are the benefits of business automation?
To understand why businesses invest considerable amounts of time and money into automating their processes, all we have to do is look at the positive results that RPA can bring. Here are a few of the key benefits:
- Reduced costs – Utilising a digital workforce can lead to typically time-consuming tasks being done much quicker, with substantially reduced resources and expenses. RPA can also single-handedly complete work of multiple employees, meaning that you can cut costs of hiring new team members as your business grows.
- Employee satisfaction – There is a common misconception that employees are against business automation because they are worried about the security of their jobs. That’s usually not the truth, though, as RPA takes over the mundane routine tasks and leaves your team to focus on more creative, complex and meaningful work. This often results in higher employee engagement and job satisfaction levels.
- Accelerated processes – RPA solutions are designed to work fast and continuously, meaning that the various core business processes, back and front office, are doing their job 24/7. This significantly reduces any delays while improving the efficiency and productivity of different tasks.
- High accuracy – Many inaccuracies or mistakes that appear in your business processes are due to human errors, bias and discrepancies. Smart business automation solutions eliminate these risks as well as perform tasks with high accuracy.
- Improved security – RPA can help safeguard the data collection and storage processes, automatically detect any suspicious activity in your systems, identify human errors and find the best solutions to deal with these breaches swiftly.
How to implement business automation?
The process of RPA development will be different for each business and, unless your team members have previous experience in this area, seeking expert services is recommended. The most important thing to do is fully understand which processes you want to automate and what your expectations for each are. You should spend a considerable amount of time planning this huge project, developing a roadmap with realistic deadlines, discussing and agreeing on the concrete design of your solution.
Once you are ready to get going, you will start to develop each area of your solution, ideally one bit at the time. The processes should be fully optimised and tested with various KPIs before you move onto another part of the project. Be prepared for this to be a long and time-consuming process that must also be constantly monitored and tweaked for improvements.
Which processes can be automated?
Most of the major business processes can be fully or partly automated. This includes the various financial and accountancy processes of your business, key HR management tasks, data management, such as collection, storage and reporting, IT support with automated cybersecurity screening and incident management, marketing communications and customer support.
Additionally, there are also certain RPA solutions tailored to specific industries and the different requirements / needs within them. For example, manufacturing or retail companies can leverage RPA to help them with inventory, supply and demand planning. Healthcare businesses can benefit from the automation of file updates and test result entries. In the banking industries, RPA solutions are used for loan processing, account management, etc..
So, it’s not about what is possible to automate – it’s about the specific needs and priorities of your individual business as well as how it can leverage RPA solutions to achieve the optimal results in growth and profitability.
