Revolutionizing Efficiency: RPA's Role in Modern Business

Henry Ford once said, “The competitor to be feared is the one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.”

That’s the possibility of RPA and its ability to revolutionize efficiency in your business_.

Only you can determine what that means and how to get there in 2024—and it all starts with knowing your business’ processes today to determine what they can be tomorrow.

It’s hard to accomplish this because terms like increased efficiency, accuracy, and productivity regarding RPA are vague.

Increasing these things will have no meaning—and more importantly, tangible business results—without understanding:

• What is the right process to automate
• The metrics of what a process costs in time and dollars today
• What those numbers look like and what they mean to your business if you could reduce them tomorrow

Then there are the hidden but high-impact factors, like employee satisfaction, human error rates, and customer experience.

You want to see business and market growth, so who’s winning with RPA across sectors today?

Where are we with RPA today in various business sectors?

It’s been over two decades since RPA hit the business world and it’s come a long way since then with AI/ML advances. It’s roots in using structured data and improving consistent processes is still a big deal for small businesses and enterprises using it for:

• HR
• Supply chain & Logistics
• Finance and Accounting

Those are broad areas that can affect cost reductions and bottom-line growth, but what industries are getting the most benefit?

According to Strategic Market Research:

• BFSI captured the largest revenue share with nearly 29.2% based on use
• Manufacturing, Technology, Healthcare, and Retail (in that order) have been the biggest adopters

The global RPA market is expected to grow by over $8 billion between 2024 and 2030, according to Statista. The figure tells you nothing about how your specific business can benefit from adoption.

To be honest, that’s a complex question to answer without a lot of planning and data. You can start that process by learning how some broader RPA trends can improve operational efficiency and accuracy across sectors and businesses.

How Do You Improve Operational Efficency & Accuracy with RPA?

Leveraging RPA to deliver improved operational efficiency and accuracy starts with understanding your processes as they exists today.

Most companies don’t have that data on hand.

One method is to extract process knowledge from videos, logs, and process completion statistics automatically. The problem is that you need analytics and business process management tools to collate that data.

Before you even get to the stage of looking at new technologies, do some internal research to identify processes that are:

• Rule-Driven
• Data-Intensive
• Happening over a 24-hour period like customer and service order processing

You can then look at these processes to set specific objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to see how RPA can help to:

• Reduce operating costs
• Further digital transformation
• Increase efficiency of long or repetitive processes by humans
• Improve employee satisfaction and customer experience

One RPA trend helping to meet these objectives of improving efficiency and accuracy is the combined use of RPA and Business Process Management (BPM) where:

• BPM tools create centralized complex process design and management to improve compliance and standardization
• RPA enables fast rollout of software bots for repetitive task automation
• These two software technology stacks collectively provide the framework to:
• Manage process variations, deviations, and exceptions
• Streamline operations
• Build a business culture of innovation where humans and RPA bots work together to free humans for more important work
• Maximize data accuracy, integration, and flow to eliminate data silos and automate data transfers

This melding of people, processes, and technology through data analytics has a big impact on the way your business operates and how people do their jobs. It’s vital to understand how you want those things to work to everyone’s benefit before any thought of RPA solutions, choices, and implementation.

How Does RPA Affect the Workforce?

Your goal is to always shoot for seamless collaboration—whether it’s between people, or humans and RPA bots—to transform processes, the workforce, and the business.

Work has changed dramatically in the last five years now that we are in a constantly changing hybrid and remote world, which changes how:

• The work gets done
• Employees communicate
• Collaboration happens across processes

This is the crux of the effect of digital transformation on the workplace and the needed skill sets of your workforce because RPA plays a big part in:

• Streamlining processes to make them faster and more accurate
• Enabling the workforce to upskill and play a more vital role in the business

These new skills are coming from areas as diverse as RPA, low code, and citizen developers that enhance individual employability and advancement within the company by:

• Freeing employees from mundane tasks
• Creating an organizational culture of continuous learning
• Removing silos between developer and process end users to reimagine company processes
• Making it possible to orchestrate and automate workflows across disparate systems for holistic information flow and real-time decision making

The result can lower costs while increasing the bottom line, innovation, employee satisfaction and market competitiveness.

Here are a few examples of how RPA transforms business that I’ve seen change the game for some organizations.

Examples of RPA's Transformative Effect on Business Processes

Most of the transformative uses of RPA I’ve seen have been with Solugenix partners, like:

This case study showing how we helped a global investment management firm worth $2 Billion in assets implement RPA. They were able to cut work hours for application approval processes by 75%, saving the company 200 hours of labor on average per month.

Another of our case studies shows how we partnered with a medical technology innovations patient support global leader. The goal was to increase the speed and accuracy of risk analysis reporting that guides the business, which delivered results of:

• Cutting month-long procedures to less than a day, saving 6,000 labor hours annually
• Drastically reducing quality personnel manual work hours and increasing employee satisfaction
• Accurate real-time report revision availability giving management clear risk management review process oversight

The quote from Henry Ford about quietly improving your business over time is truer today than it ever was.

Everyone successful with RPA implementation does it quietly and doesn’t tell their secrets because…

Every business and every process are different, so every RPA implementation is generally bespoke.

What every RPA success does tell you is to:

• Pick the right processes based on ROI
• Understand those processes as they exist today
• Create a benchmark of how long it will take to achieve that ROI (some ROI is short term, and some is long term, but both can be big)
• Make sure its scalable
• Track your progress and adjusting over time
• Find the right consulting partner to help you along the way

If you’re thinking about RPA for your business or you’ve started the journey, visit our Intelligent Automation Service Page to learn more.

When you’re ready to see how we can get you where you want to go, set up a free Proof of Concept meeting Here.