It’s 5:45 PM on Tuesday afternoon.
You’re reviewing several reports related to your team’s work stats from the previous week, checking to see what meetings you have for tomorrow, and tidying your desk as you need to leave soon to pick up the kids from soccer practice. All of a sudden, your SVP of Operations sends a meeting request for you and your colleagues to talk about “transformation” at the end of the week. Transformation… Hmmm…
Friday morning you and your colleagues file into the meeting room and you have no idea what will come next. There’s discussion about cutting operational costs, maybe some talk of process changes, “working smarter” and probably some glances that could range from “confused” to “fear.” Don’t be alarmed. Transformation projects are popping up across top organizations in every industry. As an expert in this arena, I’d like to help you take a proactive stance and get ahead of any transformation project by explaining how automation solutions can be central to a company’s transformation plans.
The popularity of robotic process automation (RPA) solutions is on the rise. More and more organizations are incorporating different types of automation technologies to implement changes in their businesses to make work more efficient and employees more productive. To fully realize the maximum return on leveraging automation for enterprise transformation, it’s time to think differently. Using robotic automation solutions to address specific “straight through” processing is an effective tactic, but does it support the overall “big picture” of your company’s transformation vision?
Sure – you want to have rapid impact when you’re testing the waters with new technology. I’ve worked with companies that have taken many different approaches. The organizations that are experiencing the greatest return on their technology investments are the ones that take a more strategic approach and use a formulaic system for making incremental changes that impact the business.
The first step is to map out a transformation plan. Of course, you have your overall strategy and long-term vision. But you must devise an incremental path so that you’re able to make small improvement steps that yield positive and immediate outcomes.
How do you score a quick win? One of the most effective approaches is to take an inventory of all the activities your employees are doing during their day.
During a work day, your employee is most likely required to perform a number of repetitive tasks that do not necessarily require any type of decision making. Considering your investment in payroll, is this the most strategic use of talent? Aside from being time-consuming, repetitious work activities are also error prone. Using robotic automation, you can remove the need for employees to perform these repetitive activities and enable these transactions to be processed digitally with greater accuracy. By creating more streamlined work processes, employees are able to perform their jobs more effectively which increases employee engagement and retention.
Robotic automation improves key business processes to accelerate transaction times, remove opportunities for errors, and enables your organization to scale quickly for spikes in volume.
With 24/7 transaction processing capabilities, robotic automation solutions can increase work throughput and eliminate processing backlogs, which also translates into lower cost per transaction and reduced costs associated with rework.
Here are a few of the benefits of using robotic automation as a first step in transforming the way your employees process transactions:
– Accelerate transaction processing
– Increase work throughput
– Scales quickly for volume spikes
– Reduce staffing costs
– Around-the-clock processing capabilities
– Improve employee engagement
– Extend technology investments
– Decrease error rates
– Reduce rework costs
Hopefully these are benefits you’ll realize in a very short period of time. By leveraging automation to remove work tasks from the employee desktop, you can let the automations run without human interaction, and your employees are freed to do higher value activities that require more heuristic work rather than just manually keying in information or processing data.