Why is RPA needed?

Or perhaps the question is “Why is RPA required?”

The answer is rapidly becoming “Our competitors are already using it.”

RPA, Robotic Process Automation, may sound technical, but it is a simple message – You could spend hours each day doing routine work on your computer, or you could get an RPA software robot to do it for you. What is the best way for you and your colleagues to spend your time?

With the current crisis there is plenty to deal with. Ignoring the investments that competitors are taking to improve their productivity through automation is generally not a good a strategy.

• You can continue with your operation.
• The team can cope.
• Automation, well that can wait, the process is not broken.
• You can work late again to catch up.

RPA is an option for most businesses.

As a business, you will not see competitors investing in productivity until it really hurts. With the pressures of the recession, productivity is key to keeping customer service levels and being able to operate when there are challenges on margins.

RPA is needed to deliver productivity improvement. If the routine is completed by an RPA software robot, it enables you to spend time dealing with the exceptions, the unusual and really helping a customer in a way that will make a difference. Doing the routine is the expected level of service, supporting a customer with something unusual will make all the difference.

Why is RPA required for every business, it is not. Each business can decide its own levels of productivity. A few years ago a lot of businesses outsourced some of their routine activity from the UK to countries like India where the cost of manpower was less. The work is still completed. The change was cost efficient but it did not address the real problem. Recently RPA has started to be used to bring the activity back to the UK, the work is completed by software robots controlled and operated in the UK.

The UK’s Productivity has continued to lag behind other leading countries for many years and has been termed the “UK Productivity Puzzle”. This background partly explains why RPA is needed by businesses across the UK. If a business is operating well, why RPA is required could be questioned, but any improvement in productivity has to be of benefit to a business.

Apart from the direct impact of RPA in improving business productivity, there is an extra reason why RPA is required and that is to eliminate human error. When people perform a routine task, they typically make about errors in about 4% of the actions. There is normally a direct cost of correcting those errors and depending upon on how a customer is impacted by the error there can be a large indirect impact as well. This quality improvement from the consistency of action delivered by RPA software robots, is another reason why RPA is needed by business.

More information is available at RPA Implementation or watch the re-imagine work video (45 seconds)