6 Reasons Why SMBs must Leverage the Power of RPA
The growth and spread of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Organisations are looking at robotic process automation (RPA) as a way to optimise their business processes and build an efficient workflow. Due to its ease of implementation and higher ROI, RPA is gaining popularity among businesses. According to reports from Deloitte, Everest Group, and NICE, compliance and productivity improvements are the most commonly observed RPA benefits among organisations with a 38% growth rate in compliance and 27% in productivity.
The RPA technology adoption is growing at a rapid rate than ever before. According to Gartner market forecast for RPA is to grow at double-digit rates through 2024 despite economic pressures from COVID-19. Sectors such as Banking, financial services, insurance and utilities have started to benefit from the outcome of their RPA uptake. Be it any industry, RPA not only benefits the larger organisations but also small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with its capabilities to streamline various business processes and increase efficiency.
So Why Bother?
- Only 35% of organisations are effective across their entire process landscape.
- One of the most consistent challenges businesses face is maintaining data quality.
- Businesses have to navigate through three fundamental changes post pandemic:
- New customer behaviour and needs – businesses need to reinvent and adapt.
- Unpredictable demand – need to upscale or downscale.
- Huge spike in working remotely.
If we had to monitor the waste and rework caused by the above mentioned and rectify the needful, then increasing employee resource is expensive and can limit the organisation from achieving scalability. RPA has played a big role for many enterprises during the pandemic. Gartner predicts that 90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022 as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labour and manual effort.
In simpler words, RPA aids in automating tedious rule-based business processes, allowing employees to focus on other critical tasks. Repetitive actions by an employee on a computer can easily be mimicked by RPA. For instance, RPA can assist finance departments in invoice processing or perform sales-admin activities such as sales order entry and invoicing for sales departments. From managing invoice processing, sales orders, accounting reconciliation to handling ERP data entry, data queries, payroll, RPA can streamline operations and reduce costs for organisations in several ways.
Benefits of RPA
Rework caused by erroneous data entry, lack of process know how, increased onboarding costs for employees and challenges with employee retention eat into operational costs and reduce the overall margins for many of these businesses. Research carried out in 2017 showed mental and physical exhaustion was prevalent for more than 50% of business owners in SMBs only to be surpassed by financial worries and isolation.
SMBs need to embrace RPA to increase their margins but also to ensure their employees are equipped and not time poor to deliver on high value tasks.
Leverage the power of RPA to achieve
- Operational efficiency: RPA software can work round the clock. In an organization, teams can complete increased volumes of work in less time with the help of RPA solutions, which means faster turnaround time, zero waiting time, and increased efficiency.
- Accuracy: When employees multitask owing to their heavy workload, the number of errors and rework increases resulting in higher costs and lower efficiency. RPA can eliminate these issues increasing both efficiency and effectiveness of a process.
- Change Management: Humans need much time to adapt to process changes. RPA eradicates this issue and instantly helps in process change rollouts, ensuring regulatory compliance and a faster adoption rate owing to the change built into the process automation.
- Data Management and Intelligent Insights: For humans, it is difficult to log every task detail such as turnaround time, waiting time, defects occurred, etc., especially when time frame is short, and workload is high. RPA is very smart in this respect as it can store data at every step and provide for the same.
- Customer Experience: RPA frees up employees’ time so they can prioritize difficult tasks like customer complaints and queries giving personalized attention thereby improving customer outcomes and decreasing response time while increasing speed to market.
Implementation
Today, RPA is transforming the way SMBs manage their business processes. SMBs can successfully implement RPA in their existing workflows. Let us find out how.
- Define Scope: SMBs need to define the scope for RPA services at their workplace. It is important to determine, examine, and measure, the performance of the current process and select processes to automate to reduce the pain point for the business.
- Relevant Documentation:Proper documentation can help SMBs determine repetitive processes. It can enable SMBs to initiate common standards for processes and simplify the workflow.
- Calculate ROI: ROI for an RPA project is generally 6 – 9 months which makes it a better project choice than the other technology initiatives of similar calibre.
