“The ability to digitally reimagine the business is determined in large part by a clear digital strategy supported by leaders who foster a culture able to change and invent the new… What separate digital leaders from the rest is a clear digital strategy combined with a culture and leadership posed to drive the transformation.”
Deloitte, Strategy, not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation
RPA IS GOOD FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION EFFORT
The expanding technology is capable of improving business outcomes. In this context, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has the capacity to support digital transformation. For this reason, many businesses are looking for ways in which they can bring this kind of change to their business functions, particularly to ensure they are using cutting edge technology.
It is important to understand that RPA takes on a very different role depending on the process and the industry. Across various industries such as finance, insurance, legal, media, primary infrastructure, hospitality and utilities, RPA is used to automate mundane, high volume, and time consuming processes. These can include various tasks such as order and AP processing, HR, data audits and migration, service job entry, or invoicing. Consequently, RPA is reshaping the ways these organizations can operate, as well as their efficiency levels. But how does this support digital transformation?
RPA is best described as a technology that will assist in evolving digital transformation for companies across all industries and all functions.
Through its automation capabilities, RPA allows organizations to tackle operational challenges (e.g. execution of large amounts of back office activities). Companies can gain knowledge about their business patterns and the performance of their workflows through data provided by RPA. Companies can then leverage this information to adopt digital strategies, which, in turn, help adapt their processes to be more efficient. In addition, RPA makes the achievement of digital transformation become a quick and straightforward process. For instance, robots can be taught to mimic the actions of employees, ranging from clicks and copy-paste tasks to more complex duties, such as workflows or invoicing.
In many environments, the existing process flow can be redesigned for robots to make use of increased speed. Further, continuous and highly accurate activities can incorporate validation and verification without the need to stop and recheck its steps. The beauty of RPA is that it can work in the exact same way as a person does. This means that it is able to work with legacy systems, all-manner of business systems, and external systems, without the need to restructure existing platforms. Implementation can then occur even within a matter of days.
Removing the burden of back office tasks allows employees to then focus on more strategic and high-level tasks. By bringing the focus to the front office, RPA can help to bring about improved business performance, its outcomes, and, essentially, digital transformation.
HOWEVER, THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS PRIOR TO ATTAINING IT
The problem with RPA implementation is that more than 80% of its capacity is underutilized. Moreover, more than 70% of RPAs installed are used for reporting. Only 25% are used for other complex operational processes.
Therefore, before acquiring RPA, ask and try to answer to these following questions. In this way, RPA performance will be improved.
- Do my employees spend large amounts of time doing simple, repetitive tasks? What percentage of my workforce is performing these same tasks?
- Do I maintain a large workforce just for managing seasonal peaks in workload?
- Can the processes in question be mapped from end-to-end based on predefined inputs?
- The processes in question belong to the “core-business”- or “business support” areas?
- Is it possible for a robot to initiate these processes according to a defined event/schedule?
- Are there decision points within the processes that require human intervention? Is the human touch critical for the quality of the process output?
- Are the processes stable or do they change frequently?
- Is the standardization level high-enough when it comes to the data involved and current processes?
Takeaway:
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Bill Gates