The 6 values of business process automation
How exactly do organisations benefit from Business Process Automation?
When economic outlooks are bleak does it really help to shelve automation for later?
Organisations sometimes understand how Business Process Automation (referred to henceforth as Robotics Process Automation, or “RPA”) works, but don’t see the value it can bring to their organisation. This is especially true when the economic outlook is bleak and companies are reluctant to invest on anything that goes beyond “keeping the lights on.” But does this mindset really withstand scrutiny?
Even acknowledging that the initial investment for RPA is relatively small compared to big IT solutions, it’s still worth exploring what a company gets for its money. There are various benefits we list here, but in its simplest terms, RPA delivers more work completed for less money and with less risk.
Let’s look at how that works. The first thing to identify is Working Time. Once you have an automation up and running, you can run that automation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So even if the robot were designed to work in exactly the same manner as a human, your robot could execute that work for 168 hours a week. That’s around approximately 4.5 times more working time delivered in the same elapsed time than its human equivalent within the same elapsed time period. When you take into consideration that the automation will not need to attend training, go to meetings, take breaks, chat to a colleague or be off sick, then this working time ratio is pushed up even higher.
The second thing to be mindful of is Productive Output. Any automation, when properly designed and coded, is not only more available than a human, it is also more efficient and productive during that working time, ergo, more productive per hour of working time.
Putting all the above together, our experience has highlighted that an automation will process up to 10 times the amount of work a human could within the same elapsed time.
It is clear that investment to design and build the processes automations is needed, and also for maintainance in case of change. But we see that those investment costs do not noticeably reduce the cost efficiencies that can be realised ...... depending on the automation and your IT QA.
The more that we, at Flux, implement automation, the more that we see it demonstrated that the selection of the right business processes is crucial. That, though, is a topic for another blog post and of course is an area where Flux can provide even more value.
Moving on to the less obviously monetizable benefits, a third valuable contributor to organizational efficiencies conferred by RPA is Increased Quality.
Processes which are excellent candidates for automation are, by their very definition, repetitive, boring and require no creativity... precisely the sort of activity which is highly prone to human error.
In a recent undercover check on airport luggage scanning – a classic mundane task but requiring lots of attention – TSA agents failed to detect 70% of suspicious items [1]. Incredibly this was an improvement on the previous fail rate of 95%.
This is not a surprise when one considers the activity required. Not many of us can sustain repetitive tasks ad-nauseum without losing focus. In this example, the agents inevitably go to autopilot and their omissions are not caught.
When repetitive tasks are completed through RPA there is no loss of focus, no resulting omissions or mistakes, and work is identically repeatable and auditable.
This brings us to the fourth benefit, which are enormous upsides for Compliance. To use pharma compliance as an example, as long as the RPA infrastructure OQ is in place, then the IQ – as long as the automation is properly designed to prove the right audit outputs - can look after itself. So fairly major implications for risk reduction.
Our fifth RPA benefit is Scalability and Versatility. The robots are generalists which process work according to need. If, for example, your finance team is overloaded with month end but your sales team is idle due to seasonality, it can be difficult to assign under utilised people across to address the balance. The sales people simply won’t understand the finance tasks, at least not in time to be helpful.
But with RPA, as long as the process is delivered, and you are able to cleverly schedule work sharing to conserve licences, you can set as many as you like to the task and vary that across time.
Lastly and sixth, but most importantly for many, RPA results in Increased Employee Satisfaction, and hence reduced churn.
As the tasks that get automated lean toward the tedious, they are often tasks despised by employees. Indeed, we find that a quick way to find suitable candidates for automation is to visit a department and ask them which admin tasks they hate to do. Freed up from repetitive tedious tasks, us humans are able to focus on what we do best, whether that’s delivering appropriate customer service in CRM functions, or front-line care in hospitals.
Beyond the obvious positive impact on employee wellbeing, this can also reduce the cost and effort of unnecessary recruitment.
All of this adds up. If for example you’re onboarding customers or patients and there is an appreciable backlog, then this can bring a dramatic improvement to customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality. As we are all aware, these are genuine contributors to a company’s worth in this day and age.
So, in summary, RPA brings multiple benefits to an organisation.
Increased Working Time
Increased Productive Output
Increased Quality
Compliance Attainment
Scalability and Versatility
Increased Employee Satisfaction
Keep watching or sign up to receive our future blogs on the selection of RPA candidates to maximise return on investment, how RPA does not necessarily equate with reducing your employee workforce, and the position of RPA on the IT value chain – how important is IT QA?