Robotics Process Automation leverages robots or bots to automate repetitive, tedious, manual tasks enhancing the overall quality of work in an organization. RPA’s benefits are wide ranging from improving employee experience to enhancing efficiencies and accuracy. But how do you start your automation journey? What business processes offer the maximum advantage if you had to prioritize? The key lies in identifying opportunities that are high volume, optimum value, and high stakes.
According to an AIIM Watch Report , technologies like RPA and intelligent automation offer an opportunity not only to enhance processes but to reimagine them completely.
Even so, here are some ways in which to identify processes as the best candidates for automation using RPA application:
1. Processes that are repetitive with high volumes
These are the easiest targets for automation as they take away key employee time that could be spent on activities that require critical thinking and cognitive skills. When employees get saddled with these processes, it can adversely impact an organisation’s ability to scale and grow.
2. Processes that are high value
Processes that immediately promise high return on investment such as sales and marketing efforts, customer experience, etc.
3. Processes that involve high stakes
These are high risk processes where the smallest human error or delay could land your enterprise in a mess. Think of processes that involve a great degree of compliance, regulatory audits etc. Since RPA solutions follow a rules-based system for manipulation, the accuracy levels are unmatched.
Considering these factors, there are obviously some business processes that have more opportunities for automation. Let’s look at some of the most popular and beneficial processes that can be automated leveraging RPA services:
Invoice processing
A Gartner report suggests that around 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement RPA. . Almost every business deals with invoice processing. It is one of the most important operations for finance departments. Yet, as a function, it carries many challenges such as the varied formats(PDF, MS Word etc) in which vendors may submit the invoices. This results in a lot of work for financial teams to transfer the data from varied sources into a unified format.
Organizations can use RPA to set up automatic invoice processing as soon as they are received. The bots can automate the data, reconcile errors and even make decisions based on rules for processing. This minimises the need for manual intervention and speeds up the entire invoice processing format including exception handling.
Accounts Reconciliation
Reconciliation just like invoice processing is a critical business process within the realm of the accounting department. Accounting teams manually verify records and balances for accuracy by comparing multiple documents from disparate sources. The key challenge with reconciliation is that it’s one of the most tedious tasks. At the same time, it is crucial to verify the records.
RPA presents the perfect solution to automate the account reconciliation process. Bots can automate the process of data extraction from multiple sources, with a high accuracy rate and reconcile various orders with corresponding notes. This improves the overall consistency and reliability of accounts reconciliation.
Payroll
Payroll is a time-consuming and repetitive process that needs to be carried out monthly for the HR team in each company.
Payroll requires a considerable amount of data entry, often leading to inaccuracies, delays in payment and ultimately disgruntlement in employees. By using RPA, the entire payroll process can be automated. Bots can verify data consistency across multiple systems, check timesheets, load earnings and calculate tax deductions. The entire process can be automated from end-to-end, freeing up HR teams to focus on other high value tasks that benefit the organization’s growth.
On average, a company with 50 employees can easily save $ 20000, a year by leveraging RPA for time and attendance processes.
User termination
Just like resume screening, employee onboarding, user termination is a key HR activity to ensure exit management. HR teams undertake various tasks to make sure that the employees’ accesses are removed, and that knowledge transfer is carried out in time. This means both HR and IT teams need to scan multiple systems to deactivate access and input termination information into the system.
Businesses can leverage RPA to implement a fool-proof user termination process by automating exit and de-provisioning processes. This can be done by automating ERP user termination activities, consolidating employees input and feed to downstream systems and performing exit surveys. The entire process from data entry to exit records, notification of stakeholders and processing final payments can be automated with RPA.
Conclusion
No two organizations are the same and therefore the RPA adoption needs for every business should be unique to them. If you are ready to embark on your RPA journey, we can help you to make the right decisions regarding what to automate, how much to automate and see the ROI of automation quickly. We can help you identify the best RPA use cases and processes for your organization, providing customized solutions. Talk to our RPA consultants for a free consultation today.
