How can my business benefit from Robotic Process Automation?

If your business is growing steadily and sustainably, you will be feeling pretty confident about its future success, and justifiably so. So why would you shake things up by changing the processes that are working so well for you and your business at the moment? 

Why would you invest in new technology, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), without being sure of the benefits to your business? This is a common concern we hear from business owners and CIOs, who are conscious of the expense involved in investing in new technology and are wary of doing so without reassurance of the return on investment (ROI).  

RPA software is unparalleled in its capability to transform business. It has been making waves across all industries for the past couple of years due to its ability to complete routine back-office processes quicker, more accurately and at less cost than employing staff to do the same job. 

Business benefits of RPA to improve workflow

 Everyone is naturally wary of change, but it’s only by investing in your business that you can take it to the next level, stay one step ahead of your competitors and increase your market share.

For those who are keen to invest but want to be sure of ROI first, RPA can be deployed across one single task as a starting point. It works seamlessly alongside your existing legacy system, making it relatively low cost to implement and the logical first step on your company’s path to digital transformation.

We find developing a Proof of Concept works well for our clients. Once they begin to see the business benefits, it is relatively simple to scale RPA solutions across numerous business processes.

As long as a task is manual, repetitive and rules-based, with a low exception rate, an RPA solution can be designed to improve the existing process.  

The business advantages of RPA are compelling and include: 

• Increased revenue
• Eradication of errors 
• Improved productivity
• Standardisation
• Scalable solutions
• Saves time

When was the last time you evaluated your workflows?

Every long-standing organisation should periodically reassess their back-office processes to evaluate their business efficiency and the performance and wellbeing of their staff. 

We see so many businesses who, wary of technological developments, continue to use the same systems they’ve always used. “It’s worked for us so far,” being the common refrain. This might be the safe option, but in doing so businesses are losing out on the cost-saving, production-improving benefits RPA offers.

Increased revenue

The bottom line for all businesses is revenue and, specifically, whether they’re making enough of it. Anything that generates income will be of interest to CEOs, meaning increased revenue is perhaps the number one reason for implementing RPA software.

There are many options for increasing revenue, but they all boil down to these three key strategies:

1. Sell more of your product or service – To do this you will need to invest in a new marketing strategy and personnel to implement it, and a bigger or more effective sales team. In addition, you will potentially need more manufacturing capacity and extra warehouse space, both of which require an increase in logistics.
2. Raise prices – This is an obvious option but, in a competitive marketplace, price hikes don’t go down too well with consumers, who are quick to vote with their feet and look elsewhere for a comparative product that leaves them with more money in their pocket.
3. Streamline your business processes – The third option for making more money is to look at ways to be more efficient with your existing processes. 

We’ve all heard the story of American Airlines saving $40,000 by giving passengers one less olive in their salad. The moral of this story being that if your aim is to increase revenue, you should first look to find easy ways to make efficiencies in your business – and no, that doesn’t necessarily have to mean redundancies. 

Staff are expensive, robots are not. If you’re paying for a member of staff, and the deskspace, pension contributions, sick pay, parental leave etc. that goes along with that, you want to make sure that person is contributing to your business in the most valuable way they can. 

It doesn’t make good business sense to pay a person to carry out repetitive, manual tasks when a robot can mimic them, and do it more accurately and faster, for a fraction of the cost. 

By outsourcing day-to-day business processes to a digital workforce, more can be achieved without an increase in personnel spending, which ultimately results in increased revenue. 

Eradication of errors

Part of what makes us human is making mistakes. This is great for our individual learning and personal development, but not so good for business.

No matter how meticulous your staff are, errors are inevitable. How do you accommodate these as a business? Perhaps you have built a contingency into your budget, or actively seek a way to reduce the potential for errors to be made in the first place? 

While anyone can make a mistake, those members of staff whose job it is to continually update your ERP system and repeatedly enter data into the correct fields are inevitably most prone to error. They are the least engaged employees in your organisation and are continually required to handle large volumes of data.

Imagine the consequences if, after spending an entire day doing tedious data entry work, an employee mistyped a decimal point during their last accounting job of the day. Scaled up, that 0.63p mistakenly entered into the ERP as 06.3p instead could cost thousands of pounds.  

Improved productivity

As the wise Benjamin Franklin once said some 300 years ago, “Time is money,” which has become something of a mantra for entrepreneurs ever since. 

When employing staff, especially those based in the office, business must consider the number of hours that will be lost to unproductivity. Humans need to eat after all, not to mention they take tea breaks, cigarette breaks and toilet breaks, sick leave and holiday.  

Employees lose an average of 38 productive days every year, according to the 2019 Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey, with 1.1% of their working hours being lost due to absence and 13.4% due to presenteeism. The report defines presenteeism as “being present at work but being limited in some aspects of job performance by a health problem and thus experiencing decreased productivity and below-normal work quality”.

The report also found that productivity loss was higher among lower-income workers, such as those staff members involved in repetitive tasks. 

In comparison, RPA has the ability to work 24/7. Robots don’t get sick, they don’t need to sleep and they don’t need to catch up on last night’s TV over the watercooler. 

As a result, both the amount of work completed and the speed at which it is achieved increases significantly with an RPA solution. The only limit to productivity with an RPA system is the amount of work your business needs processing.

 Standardisation

Having a standardised procedure in place is essential to any organisation that handles a large volume of data. When designing processes, business owners must consider questions such as which currency they will input monetary figures – of particular importance for international businesses; and what format they will enter names (first name, then surname, or vice versa?).

Once this procedure is agreed upon, not only must it be consistently followed, but anyone new who enters data into the system must be trained to understand your process. 

Once again, this is an area in which humans are fallible; they have the potential to introduce their own inconsistencies to the process. With no sentience, robots, on the other hand, will never veer from the path you have set from them. 

RPA software robots work by watching the steps that a human user takes to complete a particular process. The bots then capture and document that process and follow this set of predefined rules to exactly mirror the human-designed workflow. 

Scalable solutions

Once your business is running at peak performance, scaling up to the next level requires an investment of time and resources. 

Hiring new staff is costly and always a risk: 

• How can you be sure the candidate is up to the job?
• Will they work quickly enough? 
• How meticulous are they?
• Will they fit in with your company culture? 

For seasonal businesses who may only need extra staff at busy times of the year, recruiting and training temporary workers or freelancers whom you trust and can get up to speed quickly is even more of a challenge. 

Once RPA software has been embedded into your organisation, adding additional bots to cope with an increased workload can be done at very little cost. There is no new training required, or the costs associated with that. 

When business slows down again, you can simply decommission those bots that are no longer needed, ready and waiting to begin again when required.

Saves time   

When it comes to speed, there’s no beating robots. Not only do they work at a faster pace than humans ever could, they never tire. 

This key advantage of RPA software saves business countless hours. RPA runs in the background performing the run-of-the-mill business processes critical to business without anyone even noticing. 

With the time saved by implementing an RPA solution, people within your organisation are freed up to carry out higher-value tasks. 

It makes sense to use relatively expensive staff to their full potential by giving them more time to focus on those tasks that require emotional intelligence and strategic thought and that will bring tangible benefits to your business, something that robots are incapable of.      

If you’re keen to explore how your business can increase revenue, eradicate errors, improve productivity and save time then try our Robotic Process Automation cost calculator. It’s a simple tool to help business owners calculate their current spend on repetitive processes and demonstrate the potential cost savings RPA could provide. 

RPA can be applied to a wide variety of business processes. We always work closely with our clients to design a bespoke RPA solution for their specific business challenges. Get in touch today for a no-obligation introductory chat about how we can improve your business.