Exploring the Benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

“What’s really interesting is that, if you look at the figures for productivity and look at a sector like the manufacturing of car vehicles, they’ve increased productivity since 2009 by 58%, a massive increase,” says Moss. “But if we look at financial services and insurance since 2009, productivity has fallen by 10%. In banking, financial services and insurance, we’re actually going backwards. Things are getting more expensive. They’re taking longer to produce or provide. And we’re actually getting a worse service as a result.”

This is what David Moss, an RPA enthusiast and the founder of UK’s leading software company Blue Prism, shares in his Ted Talk titled “White Collar Robots.” He elucidates that organizations are utilizing only 10% of human resources as they are wasting their talent on tasks that can be easily done by automation. When he is asked to describe RPA, he uses this term: Player-less piano. He quotes

“Think of something a bit more like a player-less piano. You’ve got the same instrument. You’ve got the same piece of music. But you’ve trained the piano to play that piece of music, and then you can take the player away from the keyboard. The same principle applies…[RPA] takes the mundane, the repetitive, the robot-like activities away from the person and allows them to focus on the skills that they have – the management, the decisioning, the empathy, etc. It’s important to think beyond a single robot or a single process that needs to be automated. Instead, think in terms of your virtual workforce working hand in glove with your human workforce. Think about humans working alongside their virtualized, automated counterparts.”

Here’s one thing David Moss’s Ted Talk makes clear: RPA is inevitable. Taking the robot out of humans, as he mentions, is a mindset that organizations should cultivate to differentiate between tasks that need automation like data entry, system updates and human intervention like critical thinking, logical reasoning, problem solving. The goal is to help people focus on the skills they were hired for in the first place.

Current Scenario of RPA: Automation is Happening but at a Tortoise’s Pace

How are industries responding to the rapid growth of RPA and automation in general? Let us look at the statistics. 90% of organizations in a recent survey have expressed their willingness to adopt RPA. However, only 20% of enterprises have actually adopted RPA services to automate their business processes and workflows. The only industries that have been quick to this adoption are the insurance and manufacturing industries, given that these two sectors heavily depend on human labor for executing every process step. Other sectors especially education, media and entertainment, legal, R&D are lagging in automation. One thing is certain. Business leaders are chasing after RPA but are clearly falling short of its implementation. One of the reasons for this is that many of them are not aware of the impact it can have on their business. This blog details the benefits of RPA and the impact it can have on specific industries. Let’s explore.

RPA is the Lever of Transformation: Decoding the Benefits of RPA

Leverages Cost savings

Using RPA tools can cost you as little as one-fifth of an onshore FTE (Full-time Employee) and one-third of an offshore FTE. Furthermore, the RPA methodologies could reduce error rates by 20% and free personnel from tedious duties, allowing them to focus on value-added initiatives. According to a study by the Everest Group, the enterprises that have adopted RPA have experienced benefits like:

• A 4x increase in the ROI
• A 50% improvement in operational activities.
• Higher impact in key strategic areas.

Enhances Customer Satisfaction

When you free up your employees from routine tasks like tabulations and forms, you give them a chance to focus on attentive customer service. This, in turn, improves customer experience and leverages the ability to fulfil all the requirements of service-level agreements.

Bolsters Productivity

RPA can finish your tasks 5 times faster than any human. Since it can work 24*7, it can get work done quickly and efficiently, leaving room for more work to get completed. Increased productivity can cut down unnecessary expenses and give an impetus to rapid growth.

Encourages Accuracy

100% accuracy, 100% consistency and 100% policy compliance-RPA lets you experience few clerical errors and saves the time that you usually spend on rectifying these mistakes. This can have a huge cumulative impact on both your customer satisfaction levels and cost savings.

Enables Resource Utilization

A robotic workforce can help you scale operations and elicit quick responses to demand spikes or lulls. Offloading frees up your employees from mundane tasks and makes them handle those tasks that offer high value to your business. This can potentially change the labor equation but ensures that you don’t have to cut down on full-time equivalents.

Ramps up your ROI

A switch to RPA can see your operating costs go down by 50% and a higher ROI within weeks. It even allows you to efficiently utilize your existing IT assets to avoid spending on new, cost-extensive investments.

Contributes to less staffing headaches

Staffing can prove to be highly tedious, given the uneven demand and high turnovers. Since bots can be scaled up as per the requirements and deployed easily, you can ensure the right employee joins your organization at the right time.

How RPA can Turn Around these Industries?

RPA in Banking

With high volumes of withdrawals, deposits, and other transaction files, the banking industry requires efficient technology to manage its day-to-day operations. While curtailing processing times, RPA technologies can remove human errors and facilitate quick access to information, ensuring a transparent environment.

RPA in Healthcare

RPA technologies can help healthcare companies automate processes including claims processing, patient scheduling, data input, and invoicing. Since less time is spent on administrative activities, the healthcare sector can devote more time to improving patient-provider interactions.

RPA in Insurance

The insurance industry can enable RPA automation for tasks like reviewing claim requests, analyzing, and remitting claims. RPA ensures profitability while cutting costs and limiting risks.

RPA in Retail

The continuous convergence of the retail industries creates opportunities for RPA implementation services. Investments in data analytics, logistics, and supply chain management systems have necessitated the use of RPA for cumbersome process steps with manual work. Furthermore, RPA bots can even handle tasks like extracting information from manufacturer's websites, month-end reporting, and credit reporting.

RPA in Manufacturing

Manufacturing sectors are shifting away from manual labor and gravitating towards robots to assemble, analyze, and pack their products. Most of them are adopting RPA to automate business processes to eliminate human errors, reduce the human workforce, and increase productivity. These processes include ERP, logistic data, product pricing comparison, and data monitoring.

How to make RPA a part of your business? Get started with Cloud4C

They say people must change themselves to keep up with the changing times. Likewise, for organizations, they must rely on RPA to revamp dated processes and deliver the best business outcomes to sustain themselves in this fast-paced digitized world. With Cloud4C’s end-to-end RPA services, you can perform repetitive tasks at a much faster rate with higher accuracy and a substantial increase in productivity. We can assist you with our customized RPA consulting services intended for your business-specific needs, be it reviewing business feasibility for automation, consulting services for finding the proper processes, or implementing, installing, and monitoring RPA Robots. Get in touch with us to know more about our RPA solutions.