How Can Your Business Profit from Robotic Process Automation?

How Can Your Business Profit from Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation or RPA sounds like something for the big leagues. Doesn’t it? That is how it used to be. But now small and medium businesses too can benefit from RPA. Let us explore how businesses like yours can enhance quality, productivity and profits with affordable RPA tools that offer practical solutions to easily automatable daily business processes.

What is RPA?

Does the term robotic process automation bring to mind expensive robots working in a futuristic high-tech assembly line? Or the stuff of science fiction?

Robotic process automation is simply software that we can program to carry out basic, routine and repetitive tasks in your business.

RPA can be used in any function in your business, both front office and back. The ‘robots’ in RPA are not the hardware robots you see in the movies or in advanced manufacturing. They are software robots that can launch and operate other software precisely how you want it done, according to a set of predefined instructions.

Does RPA Adoption Require Programming Knowledge?

No programming skills are necessary to benefit from today’s RPA tools. That is the best news about the latest RPA tools in the market.

Capabilities of an RPA System

Each RPA system must have three basic capabilities.

• Ability to communicate with the other systems
  At the most basic level, think of your RPA tool having the ability to connect with commonly used apps and software such as Office 365, Slack, G-Suite, a website or various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
• Ability to make decisions
  The parameters for this decision-making process are what you want the RPA system to do.
• They must have an interface for bot programming
  In the latest available versions of RPA systems, you do not need to know about coding/programming. This is what makes RPA exciting, and affordable especially for small and medium enterprises who are not about to invest in costly software and programmers to run an RPA system in–house.

An RPA system can be used to automate various functions such as:

• Opening various applications, such as email, and renaming or moving files from one system or location to another
• Integration with tools that you already use in your business
• Data collection from various sources and web portals
• Data processing functions including data extraction and calculations

If all of the above seems rather abstract, let us look at some examples.

What Exactly Can RPA Help With?

How would you like it if you save time, speed up things and become more efficient by automating the following?

• Create a series of new customer records within a legacy system automatically from a spreadsheet list.
• Take information from one system, manipulate it, and then save it in another system.
• Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business
• Employees can request manager approval for a selected item or file
• Send a customized email when a new file is added to a collaborative working platform such as Slack or SharePoint
• Post messages to Microsoft Teams when a new task is created in Planner
• Gather and record form responses in a Google Sheet
• Sync new OneDrive Files to Google Drive or Dropbox

Examples for social media automations include:

• Save tweets to a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet
• Save Instagram comments to a Google Sheet
• Save Tweets that have a specific hashtag
• Share new Instagram photos or YouTube video to Twitter
• Post list items to Twitter after approval

Imagine how much time and hassle you save yourself and your employees if all of these can be achieved with the ease of using an app? How much more productive and organized would your days become? How liberated would everyone feel, to be freed from such routine tasks?

Now you can do these and much more with RPA tools.

RPA – Not Just for Two or Three-Step Process Automation

Today’s modern RPA platforms offer way more than automation of two or three-step processes described above in the examples. They can be used to automate complex, multi-step business critical workflows across various functions across the business.

They can also be used to automate functions that reach out to external sources—such as external websites and supply chain partners—for information gathering.

RPA Benefits to Your Business

RPA brings myriad benefits to your business. Here are 10 reasons why should you immediately consider adopting RPA in your business:

1. RPA enhances business productivity, process speed and efficiency
   This is possible because RPA helps you automates all the routine stuff that consumes time, energy, and money. RPA can bring about significant cost savings.For example, employees waiting for a message from you or an approval from their manager don’t have to disrupt their focus on work to constantly keep checking email. You can get your RPA system to send an automatic push notification when these events occur.
2. Drives efficiencies across the entire business & boosts profit potential
   We discussed Business Process Mapping in a previous article. When some of the business processes you mapped and streamlined are automated, this will help your business move on to an entire new level of process efficiencies.Sales, marketing, customer service, quality control, accounting, human resources, office administration, inventory, procurement and supply chain, production processes and all your other processes can benefit from basic RPA tools.Deploying RPA is a sure way to enhance the profit potential of your business through productivity enhancements and the cost and time savings to be achieved as a result.
3. Better quality and customer service
   RPA enables you move to a more process driven work culture. Sales and marketing teams can follow defined steps on their way to closing a sale. If they discover upsell opportunities in the process, you can create branch out commands and templates. That will help them bring these to the attention of their boss or other relevant parties without stopping their work to give a call about it or write an email.And the person getting this notice will be required to take action on it, ensuring that such opportunities are not forgotten in a busy workplace.
4. Channel your employees’ talents and time towards producing results
   When route work is automated with RPA, employees are liberated to spend their time on work that matter and lead to improved performance. Saving employees from engaging in non-value adding administrative procedures such as form filling, data re-entry, and basic processing leads to better performance.
5. Performance monitoring becomes easier and less subjective
   Managers and supervisors can view performance, actions and progress as things occur. They are able to offer immediate intervention and feedback, as employees and team members seek their help and support. Instant feedback not only improves performance; it contributes to employee engagement and satisfaction.
6. Enhanced performance translates to enhanced employee benefits and eventually, to profits
   This is especially true for sales and customer service staff, who can be empowered to use their time in getting things done and be supported with instant feedback, guidance, and troubleshooting.
7. Will improve workplace quality and lead to employee satisfaction and motivation
   When you get robots to do the mind-numbing work, instead of asking people to do them, it improves their productivity at work. They gain the freedom to optimize their skills and talents towards producing results for the business. This will inevitably improve satisfaction and motivation as well.If pay is linked to performance, employees who are able to dedicate their entire work time to delivering results, they will also receive financial benefits from adoption of RPA.Even those in administrative and back end duties whose pay is not performance related will feel that they are liberated from robotic, boring work.
8. Easier to promote staff and to onboard new staff
   Once you have mapped and streamlined your business processes, adopting RPA makes even more sense. It becomes easier to onboard new staff and promote staff to higher levels. This is because business processes are automated to make it clear to each individual their roles in a process, and what their next steps should be. It removes guesswork and uncertainty from business procedures.
9. Empowers remote working environments
   With the advent of COVID-19, more and more companies are turning to remote working. RPA is a significant enabler for remote working because many steps that would otherwise require phone calls, emails or messages—for approvals, invoicing, decision points, information share, staff training and random reminders and answers to queries—can be automated.Utilizing RPA puts you in a position to significantly reduce note taking by automating processes, tasks, activities and actions stemming from meetings and which depend on input from various individuals to move forward. The ability to combine meeting and collaborative software together with emails, file sharing and work processes have infinite possibilities to improve productivity in both remote working environments and otherwise. While many collaborative platforms offer these same features, RPA gives wings to productivity by automating sharing and collaborative functions across various platforms.
10. RPA can solve some really hairy problems
    One of the most common problems companies come across in their digital transformation efforts is the difficulty of getting their older proprietary software to work seamlessly together with new apps and cloud-based software. Even large firms face this issue, creating huge bottle necks to successful move towards digital operations.T-Mobile, which recently acquired Sprint, for example plans to use Microsoft’s Power Automate Desktop, which brings RPA capabilities to your desktop, to automate processes across both legacy and modern applications. They are looking to create end-to-end automation across internal apps that are hosted on T-Mobile and Sprint systems to bridge separate systems during our integration.
    “The RPA capability in Power Automate enables us to automate tasks across modern apps and older Sprint apps, saving us copious amounts of time and creating alignment between both systems,” T-Mobile’s Senior Developer for Power Platform, Brian Hodel, told TechCrunch.

Cost reduction potential boosts bottom line

Are you convinced that there are immense productivity gains and potential for cost reduction that may be achieved through the adoption of robotics process automation in your business? This is what makes latest RPA tools an attractive, affordable proposition for small and medium sized businesses like yours.

At AccountFWD we guide entrepreneurs like you through implementation of robotic process automation within their businesses. With RPA they mine for cost saving and productivity enhancement opportunities thus helping boost their profit potential. If you have questions about RPA, send us a note, schedule a time to connect, or give us a call 954-686-8687.