#68 The Automation Guys discuss 5 ways to use RPA to transform your business

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. In today's episode, we will cover 5 ways how you can use RPA for business transformation. So yeah, as waves of digital transformation continue to shape the way businesses work across the globe. Yeah, RPA, robotic process automation, has become sort of a staple for businesses looking to become more digital. From basic spreadsheets to fully automated employee onboarding, business transformation RPA software can can help relieve businesses, employees with a lot of repetitive tasks. So, and then in this next 5 steps, we will cover how this RPA can help you for transforming your business and how automations will make your organizations more productive, more efficient, and where the business becomes more rewarding for everyone. So, but Arno, I think we should cover briefly for everyone who is listening, who is not familiar with RPA or with the term, what is robotic process automation?

And thank you, Sascha. And again, thanks for our listeners for tuning into this episode. Again, we, we're talking about RPA today and RPA really is a concept whereby we use robotic programs or software bots which can be programmed to carry out tasks in a software interface that would normally be done by a human. So this is your Windows desktop machine, your browser. So you can train a bot to do these activities on behalf of yourself. It's usually used in instances where a task or several tasks are repetitive. And, you know, it could be sort of things like collecting data from various applications, from spreadsheets. So you can train a bot really to do these sort of activities. Again, you know, this doesn't just reduce the employee's workload, but it also reduces reduces, I guess, the risk of human error and improves accuracy when you do these tasks using a software bot. And it can even help businesses to ensure they are compliant with data privacy regulations, for example. So, so we're gonna kind of look at these 5 ways to transform your business using RPA. So the first step is looking at data mining. So data mining is It's the process of extracting useful data from your company's vast data storage silos and using that data to really paint a very detailed, accurate picture of, let's say, customer behavior, product usage, things like employee engagement, sales figures across different regions, for example. So pretty much anything that is measured using, you know, all of your digital datasets. So business transformational RPAs is really the only viable way of conducting data mining, as if you have to manually trawl through, you know, spreadsheets and kind of like your data sources, it's impossibly slow. And you know, there's a high chance of what they called sort of fatigue-induced error for humans. So setting up an RPA bot to automatically, you know, cover certain incoming data into a single dashboard could really help you identify opportunities within your business that you would have otherwise missed. So it is really kind of using this bot to look at your data, And it could really be high-volume data and to really aggregate all of that together in one place. So it's really, really easy to understand, you know, the sort of picture that this data paints, you know, for your business. And like I say, I've used the example, you know, employee engagement, for example, that's a very good way to look at, You know, if you have a large organization and you want to gauge employee engagement, for example, it will be very hard to manually collate this data. So a bot is a really good option, go-to option to be able to get to those data sources and put it in a nice, easy-to-reach place like a dashboard, for example.

Yeah, cool. Yeah, it sounds good. I think with so much data we have these days, yeah. I think it's not just impossible. I think, yeah, it's really— no human can go through that amount of data without help.

Yeah. And it's also about reliability because if you use a software bot, it's highly reliable. So you don't have this sort of anxiety that perhaps that you know, there's a kind of a human error with inside the data because it's been copied and pasted wrong. It's very accurate, very objective. So I think that that's the kind of main benefit of using a robotic software bot.

Cool. So yeah, so the other point for transforming the business with RPA is invoice processing. So one of our very classic use cases for RPA, workflow automation, process automation, and so on. So invoice processing, as we know, is one of the many really important tasks in a company, for sure more in the finance department. And yeah, and you can imagine if you're doing some errors there when you have high volume of invoices to process, it could be quite, quite a quite a big impact for the organization. And using RPA to transform this part of the business removes the chance of human error entirely. And yeah, we'll really support the finance employees, will pretty much relieve the finance employees the boring tasks of editing, checking, and sending these invoices manually. And yeah, by setting up a bot, an RPA bot, to match customers and their orders and automatically go into these invoices and create invoices, check invoices. Your business can save time. Of course, with the bot, you increase accuracy. And as I mentioned earlier, if there's a problem, it could have quite an impact on the organization. So you can really avoid such disasters using bot technology.

Yeah. And also, you know, if we look at the examples you've just used, so I've mentioned data mining and you've mentioned the invoice processing, you know, again, automation isn't just reserved for those particular use cases. It can also, you know, have an impact on the human side of the business. So HR departments, you know, across various organizations do use automation to help, you know, manage critical areas of their businesses. So for example, this could be found at the beginning of a new employee journey. So if we look at employee onboarding, for example, that process usually consists of background checks, you know, collecting payslip information, reference checks, and, you know, many more of these, these sort of tasks that needs to be done. And, you know, each of those stages of that particular process doesn't necessarily require human interaction. So if you look at background checks, for example, you might have an external agency you use. You can train a bot to do that. So again, you know, business transformational RPA can be used to speed up and create really smoother onboarding experiences for your new employees. And again, implementing automation in this particular scenario also frees up time for HR staff to focus on more pressing HR matters. And I think that's ultimately the goal of RPA and automation in general, is to ensure that the mundane activities is done by the software bots And then that frees up the HR staff in this instance, but it could be finance as well. And the example you've mentioned to focus on more pressing matters or value-added tasks.

Yeah, cool. So yeah, the next big area where RPA can be very transformational for the business is in the area of customer service. And yeah, study states that 90% of customers rate an immediate response to customer service questions as essential or very important. And further, for those 60% of customers, that means customer service will be provided 10 minutes or less. So that would be the figure. So, and but for organizations with larger customer bases and smaller customer service teams, that magic 10-minute window is is really, really difficult to achieve. And so yeah, using technologies like RPA or using chatbots together with RPA, they can transform customer service by creating a kind of filter for your customer service team. So fully automated responses, etc., and asking the right questions and going deeper and filtering out also nonsense requests or redirecting, triaging the the request in the right direction. So setting up an RPA chatbot can respond to common customer queries and can therefore significantly reduce the workload. And yeah, so the average deflection rate, as we have learned, of a chatbot is 50%. So meaning that customer service teams, yeah, can be workload can be reduced pretty much by half. So this is huge value, huge benefit to the business.

Yeah, and I guess another point here is if we look at customer data and information you store around customers. So this is a very good use case as well. And another point where You know, when we store and we handle this sort of data, especially the kind of larger datasets within the business, it can sometimes be a challenge because of course, you know, we have these vast datasets, there's very stringent data security regulations and, you know, and keeping data in a very secure and in very good health is quite tricky. So RPA can actually be used to anonymize datasets and carry out these all-important data health activities such as deleting and archiving obsolete data. And, you know, out there what we're seeing is that many businesses do rely on RPA when dealing with customer data, because it allows for high levels of accuracy and it eliminates the need for human interaction with sensitive data. So this in itself creates a, you know, a very secure data ecosystem overall. So again, it is just that ability to deploy the bot to look at these vast datasets processing these datasets, it could be sensitive information. And of course, you know, when you train the bot to deal with this information in its nature, that's sort of anonymized and protected. So RPA is very useful in those types of scenarios.

Now, really cool. And yeah, as we touched very much in the beginning on sort of data mining, finding information and trawling through data, I think the same applies as well for processes. So these few examples here in the different areas, Yeah, just, just a few. So there are so many different, different areas where RPA can then really bring the benefits to the organization. But before starting building RPA automations, yeah, it is indeed very, very much the case of finding out the issues, identifying the issues in the business and mapping manually, mapping that. That's what we used to do, or basically mapping the process across the So, but nowadays we can support that. So for RPA, we need some process discovery to find out how processes are really running and where opportunities are. So, but we can nowadays recommend to do this automatically. So there are tools out there from different vendors which look at the data and will then come up with some recommendations where are opportunities, how are the processes are really running, where are the inefficiencies. So that's really important to do instead of doing it manually, because that could be, yeah, it's a very tedious task as well. It requires lots of people. So to start with RPA to get really that transformational benefit, you need to, you need to do this step, right? And yeah, so this is what we're recommending. These 5 steps we just, or 5 ways we just covered, are just an example. And now, yeah, I encourage everyone to, to find out more about their processes and dig really deep.

Yeah, and I think the technology you mentioned, the vendors, there's various vendors out there, and it's sometimes quite hard to make a decision which vendor vendor to choose. So I would encourage our listeners to really reach out to us if you are stuck in this sort of initial step, and you know, as to which vendor you should use. Of course, we talked about process mining. There's various vendors out there that offers process mining services. And you know, it can sometimes be quite a difficult decision to decide which vendor to go for. You know, there's various capabilities out there. You know, we use a product that uses task capture, for example. So it installs a bit of software on the user's sort of desktop machines. And what that does, it kind of captures the tasks people do, you know, by keystrokes every single day. And it all kind of aggregates that into a picture. And that's the sort of thing that gives you insights onto the sort of things people do day in and day out. So again, some vendors kind of offer products like that, that allows you to kind of discover these processes, you know, that would normally be quite hard to predict if you just do a simple time and motion study with people. So again, that creates a very sort of from a project and initiative perspective, it creates almost like a priority list for the sort of automation initiatives you should go after with inside your business, because that would highlight things where people spend a lot of time and a lot of repetitive time in a day-to-day work.

Yeah, perfect. On this topic or on other topics. Of course, we are talking here on the podcast regularly, so make sure you subscribe our podcast and listen back to our previous episodes. Yeah, we will be back at another episode very, very soon. And yeah, until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again. With this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!