Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to software technology that automates repetitive tasks in a business organization. This software can make decisions based on predetermined principles and repeat tasks without error at superhuman speeds.
However, for this automation process to yield high returns on investments, you need to identify which processes can be automated using RPA. Moreover, you need to identify the processes that you should prioritize in the automation process.
Why Would You Use RPA to Automate Processes?
Every business needs to embrace technological advancements to help improve business operations. Technological advancements also help businesses understand their customers' needs better. Here are reasons why you should consider using RPA solutions to automate your business processes.
Increase Productivity
Handling repetitive business processes can be tiring and time-consuming. However, RPA solutions can help you complete these tasks within a short time, boosting the productivity of your business. This solution also allows your employees to devote their skills to activities requiring much of their attention, making them more productive.
Standardized Processes
Even when businesses optimize their office processes, it is difficult for them to ensure that human employees follow the required steps in every office location. Nevertheless, RPA software robots can help them achieve uniformity. Standardized processes help to improve the efficiency of your business.
Improves Customer Satisfaction
Satisfying your customers requires a lot of effort. If you make a mistake, your customers are likely to lose their trust in your business. To improve your customer service, use an RPA solution. This software will help you handle the dull and repetitive business processes, giving your employees more time to devote to customers. Additionally, RPA bots can help solve some customer problems when unavailable.
Enhances Security
RPA solutions are designed to handle specific business tasks. Therefore, the chances of data leaking from one department to another are minimal, enhancing the security of your business data.
Boosts Scalability Opportunities
When you want to expand your business, you may find yourself at a crossroads, especially when your business lacks the flexibility to accommodate the increased number of tasks. When your business is not flexible, you may experience various challenges, and your business may collapse. However, with RPA, you can handle all the responsibilities of a big business.
Cost-effective
Software robots handle a lot of tasks. As a result, you won't need many employees, allowing you to save on labor costs. Also, RPA enables you to avoid costly mistakes, especially when it comes to error-prone tasks. Such mistakes can increase your business costs.
What Processes Can Be Used with RPA?
Automating tasks in your business offers several perks, as discussed above. Nevertheless, you need to understand some of the business processes that need automation. Here are some examples.
Invoice Processing
Business organizations of all sizes send and receive invoices. Invoice processing is vital for most finance departments since it is related to a company's entire functionality. Nevertheless, business organizations face difficulties when processing invoices since different suppliers use different formats to submit invoices, including email and paper copy. With RPA, you can automatically process invoices regardless of the format and avoid making errors.
Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding involves various tasks, including profile creation, training, and creating new accounts for new employees. Manually handling these tasks can be overwhelming for the HR and IT departments. Additionally, the process may take time. Due to the repetitive and rule-based nature of this process, you need to automate it.
Payroll
Payroll preparation is also a rule-based and repetitive task. Manually preparing rolls is time-consuming. Also, you may face standardization problems or inaccuracy issues, leading to delays. However, with the help of RPA software, you can easily verify the consistency of employee information across many platforms.
Accounting Reconciliation
Reconciliation is a significant task in the accounting department. This process involves verifying the accuracy of various records and balances by comparing several documents from various sources.
Manually reconciling your accounts can be a tedious task. For this reason, you should use software robots to automate data extraction from various sources, which can include bills and bank statements.
Call Center Operations
RPA software can help you run call center operations. This technology uses chatbots to make the process easier and minimize long wait times from call center operators. It provides automated responses to frequently asked questions and helps call operators concentrate on more complex questions.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Data Entry
ERP data entry is a common task in businesses of any nature. Entering data into the ERP system is time-consuming and error-prone since employees need to collect data from various sources and update the ERP workflow. If the data is not entered correctly, it may cause major problems that have ripple effects.
However, you can use RPA software to automate the whole data entry procedure from data collection to entering, updating, processing, and analyzing. Therefore, your employees can complete this task in minutes, allowing them to handle other complex tasks that need more attention. Software robots will also help reduce errors and keep data clean and structured for improved business intelligence and compliance outcomes.
How Do You Decide Which Processes to Automate First?
Before automating your business processes, you need to determine which processes to automate first for a better outcome. Here are a few tips to help you decide which business process should be automated with RPA first.
Standardization and Stability
RPA is suitable for automating highly definable and repetitive tasks. These activities should be rule-based, consistent, and data-driven. However, if your business activities change every now and then or if you have unstructured data, you should think twice about using this software.
Volume
When automating your business processes, you need to consider high-volume tasks. Manually handling these tasks is time-consuming, and you may make costly mistakes. Also, RPA software can handle these tasks outside working hours, improving the efficiency of your business.
Difficulty Outsourcing
When you have a huge workload, you may consider hiring a third party to help you complete these tasks on time. However, outsourcing some tasks like financial services may be risky. Therefore, you should prioritize automating such business processes.
Complexity
RPA software can help you handle complex tasks. To identify complex tasks, you need to look for those activities that require frequent human intervention or the number of steps required to complete certain tasks. Examples of such tasks include account receivable and fraud detection.
How to get started with RPA in your business
At Teamworks, we help companies of all sizes leverage the many benefits of RPA. With a custom RPA solution, we can prioritize processes and create and maintain a RPA solution that best optimizes your business operations.
If you'd like to learn more about RPA, reach out to us. We'd love to talk.