Is Your Company Ready for Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? Here are 7 Ways to Find Out

“The biggest misconception about RPA is that it’s easy – it’s not easy. That’s why barely 10% of the buyer population in Global 2000 companies have embraced it.”

• Frank Casale, founder and CEO of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPA AI)

While Frank has a point, it can be easy if you adopt RPA for the right reasons. Let’s explain what those reasons are.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) not only transforms businesses. It also improves how work gets done.

This innovative automation technology empowers the human workforce to be more agile, flexible and productive during day-to-day operations – leading to an increase in employee satisfaction, a better customer experience and generally, higher profits for a wide range of businesses.

So, it’s no wonder why so many organisations want to take advantage of RPA to achieve better business efficiencies and streamline operational processes. But some businesses aren’t always ready for it.

How about your business? Is your team ready to embrace RPA?

7 ways to help you determine if your business is ready for RPA

Through the capabilities of software bots, RPA automates repetitive, high volume and rule-based tasks that take too much of your team members’ time when compared to the value those tasks offer.

By doing this, RPA streamlines a whole range of processes – from back-office support to front-office management. But how do you know if RPA is the right solution to accomplish your business goals?

Here are 7 ways to help you decide if Robotic Process Automation is right for your organisation.

• Spot areas that need improvement.

Start with a thorough, realistic evaluation of all the departments in your company, especially the areas that consistently underperform, and try to understand what may be causing this.

For example, consider customer service in the front or back office. Assess which processes in these departments are affected by:

• data access issues (i.e. the time required to access data across multiple applications)
• transcription errors
• manual data entry times
• excessive approval times

These challenges are easily addressed by automation and are a good indicator that your business is ready for RPA.

For more, read Robotic Process Automation Takes the Front Office: Automation and Customer Service

• Appraise the inter-departmental information flow.

Turn your attention towards information silos, which might show an underlying dysfunctionality of information sharing across various departments. Such poor intercompany communications may be due to the existence of dated systems across different areas of your company.

By modernising your operations, many communication breakdowns can be overcome. For instance, RPA can supercharge the processes of updating, tracking and sharing information within the company. If you want to ensure that the information shared is accurate, reliable and consistent throughout all of your departments, then using RPA is key.

• Evaluate the stability of your business processes.

Finding processes that are well suited for automation is a prerequisite to RPA. These processes are essentially repetitive, rule-based and somewhat exception-free.

Software robots work best when they’re set to highly stable, repeatable processes with minimal variability. Therefore, you know your company is ready for RPA if you have managed to identify a set of standardised activities that you can automate.

Here are 5 Factors to Choosing the Right Business Processes to Automate.

• Estimate the need to hire more people.

To meet the evolving demands of your growing business, you may look to hire more people. Hiring new employees, however, comes with significant costs.

As RPA automation offers a lot of scalability, this may be a more cost-effective option. Bots can easily scale up and down to handle irregular volumes of work, saving you from incurring additional labour expenses by onboarding temporary staff or paying overtime rates to an overworked team.

In fact, 81% of companies are already investing in RPA to achieve their financial saving goals – you can too.

• Assess the number of manual tasks that your employees perform.

The need for consistent data entry across various roles (for instance, in a finance company producing financial statements, activating cards, opening accounts, etc) is a sign that your company can benefit from RPA implementation.

RPA is also beneficial if you have structured and repetitive activities as well as high-frequency processes that are susceptible to human errors.

If you end up with an impressively long list of mundane tasks, your employees may get tired, bored, dissatisfied and even burned out. This is something you can prevent through the adoption of RPA.

• Find out the level of your employees’ job satisfaction.

One likely cause of employee dissatisfaction is the perceived need to waste time with tedious administrative or other low-level tasks. Unfortunately, productivity drops are a direct and undesirable consequence of this.

However, with the implementation of RPA, your employees can excel and feel more valued.

RPA automates manual tasks, so your employees can get back the time they need to focus on work that requires their skills, critical thinking and creativity. With software bots accomplishing the mind-numbing tasks on their behalf, your staff can reallocate more time to their development and contributing to the overall success of your business.

• Estimate the cost of errors.

This assessment comes as a natural flow-on to point (5) above, simply because manual data entry is often a source of many errors.

Errors themselves aren’t just unfortunate. They also need to be reviewed and corrected, wasting even more time and money.

If common errors lead to delays and consequential headaches, it may mean that your company is ready for RPA.

Are you all set to take advantage of RPA?

Could you relate to any or all of the above 7 factors?

Implementing RPA in your business brings with it a long list of practical benefits: measurable ROI, reduced cybersecurity risks, easier data management, fulfilled employees and satisfied customers. Most importantly, business automation offers a substantial competitive advantage for innovators who are ready to embrace RPA.

At CiGen, we partner with organisations like yours to help you achieve the benefits of process automation and establish a flexible operational environment for your future growth. Our ultimate goal is to energise organisations and the workforce of tomorrow as digital technologies increasingly evolve toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI).

So, if you’re company is ready for RPA, we can design bespoke automated solutions that meet your unique operational needs.

Harness the true power of automation with CiGen On Demand

Our team of RPA specialists are here to ensure you reap all of the rewards of business automation, while we address all of the potential risks.

We even provide an affordable automation service to small and medium-sized businesses through our CiGen On Demand subscription solution, making it even easier for your business to harness the true power of automation and earn back your valuable time.

Contact us today for more information on how we can help your business to succeed through robotic process automation.