Despite the tepid business spending forecasts this year, the demand for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) continues to grow at an amazing rate! The pandemic and resulting “New Normal” appears to be accelerating the adoption of this leading-edge technology. As organizations across the globe U.S. brace up for an imminent period of economic slowdown, they realize the importance of investing in a technology that can lead to resource optimization and significantly boost productivity across the organization.

RPA uses bots to automate repetitive tasks and manual processes, by interacting with websites, business and desktop applications, databases, and people.

“In about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated.” – McKinsey Study

As relevant automation opportunities abound across different functions within an organization, it can be difficult for the decision-makers to prioritize them. The simplest way to prioritize automation is to think about high volume, high value, and high stakes.

• High volume and highly repetitive business processes should be the first to get RPA injection. Such tasks consume significant time that could otherwise be spent on work that requires more human thinking and empathy. If an organization gets bogged down by the volume of repetitive tasks, its ability to grow and scale will be throttled.
• High-value revenue earning processes like sales, or those that deliver a better customer experience and reduce churn should be given next priority in the RPA implementation pipeline.
• High stakes processes or workflows where a mistake or delay could land the organization in trouble should be provided due weightage in RPA prioritization. Even a copy-and-paste error can lead to costly compliance violations or a process backlog that causes your organization to miss an important deadline.

“Leading-edge technologies like RPA can open up new opportunities not only to improve processes but to completely rethink them.” – AIIM Industry Watch Report on Digitalizing Core Business Processes

In this digital-first era, RPA allows organizations to outperform their competitors with an increased ROI and also round-the-clock work at reduced costs. And now that you know the benefits of adopting this leading-edge technology to automate the entire workflow, infrastructure, and other backend processes, let us deep-dive into eight cumbersome processes you can automate and transform across departments with RPA.

Best Use Cases of what Automation can do for you Organizations

1: Vendor/Customer/Employee Onboarding

Although these functions span across different departments, they have a lot of similarities, making them ripe for automation. There is a lot of paperwork, careful vetting, and lengthy back-and-forth negotiations between the organization and the other party involved in this process. RPA allows you to design an entirely automated onboarding process. This can include automatic status updates as well as complete integration of the information with existing internal systems.

2: Report and Data Aggregation

Data aggregation and business reporting can be especially time-consuming and tedious for the finance and accounting departments, especially at the end of a month, quarter or year. During such times of the year, every departmental staff is frantically compiling information. With RPA, you can automate the gathering and aggregating of data, shortening the effort and time involved significantly. The freed time can now be leveraged to gain insights on information and use them to make better decisions.

3: CRM Updates

Salespeople are good at selling and that is their trade! However, sales teams across most organizations have to slog through data entry tasks such as updating the CRM. Though mundane yet this information is critical for an organization to make smart strategic business decisions. Let RPA tackle this task. Bots can automatically gather intel on prospects and post it in relevant fields in the CRM.

4: Vendor and Customer Contract Renewals

Product and service companies that work on yearly contracts and SLAs need to keep track and re-sign the contract in time. RPA solutions can help you automate processes that are triggered by a date, such as all partner contracts that are due for renewal on September 1. Automation ensures that organizations do not miss out on any important contract renewal with auto-triggered reminders.

5: Payroll Processing

The changing tax laws, reporting requirements, and working on systems that do not complement each other can make payroll processing a time consuming and tedious business process. RPA offers organizations with the ability to collect and connect data between multiple systems such as HR and employee management, time tracking, accounts payable, and other accounting reports for taxation. It can simplify and reduce chunks of time involved in payroll processing.

6: Customer Due Diligence

One of the important steps involved in customer onboarding is to keep up and comply with regulations such as Customer Due Diligence, Know Your Customer (KYC), and Anti-Money Laundering. Ensuring compliance can be expensive and challenging for organizations. Luckily, RPA can tackle this problem. It can automatically acquire, enhance, and deliver the precise data from internal or external sources needed to comply. Such a solution can check a greater number of data points within a short span of time to provide a more comprehensive assessment.

7: Order Processing and Shipment Scheduling

Order processing typically involves many time-consuming manual tasks such as address verification, invoice printing, updating warehouse inventory, and reordering if the stock is low. RPA can orchestrate this process end-to-end using bots so that humans need to only pick and pack boxes. Similarly, scheduling, updating, and reporting shipment status between internal systems and portals can be a time-consuming process with risks of errors, when handled manually. RPA can extract shipment requests from incoming emails, log jobs in the scheduling systems, and provide pick-up times in customer and/or carrier portals.

8: New User Setup and Configuration

Previously, we went through new employee boarding from the HR perspective. On the IT side, the responsibilities involved include adding and configuring a new user so that the new employee can log into their computer, email, network, etc. after joining. RPA can automate this process too so that the IT department can focus on other important initiatives and high-value work.

What are the Pre-requisites for RPA Implementation?

Are you excited about this new technology, you have every right to be! RPA can transform the way your organization and teams work. And the best part is, there are no pre-requisites involved with such implementation. You don’t need to learning coding or purchase hefty software. Once you choose the right digital partner, the rest of the journey is pretty simple.

It’s Time to Increase Your Organization’s Efficiency

As it is quite evident from the list above that businesses can automate a lot of their important and manual tasks using RPA. Automation can help organizations operate more efficiently while saving time, optimizing employee productivity, and reducing operating costs.

Need a step-by-step guide on how to swiftly implement automation using RPA within your organization for positive outcomes? Contact us right away to learn more about RPA for your team industry!