The digital transformation (DX) race has led organizations to find ways to leapfrog their competitors and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the most sought first-step taken by CIOs world-wide. Digital labour such as RPA can help organizations in their DX journey by enhancing the ease of deployment and the speed and agility it confers on the enterprise while bringing immediate positive impact on ROI, cost-savings, and a near-perfect compliance rate.

The impact of RPA on a company’s operations and competitive positioning is significant on several fronts: economic value, workforce advantages, quality and control improvements, and flexible execution.

Impact of RPA

RPA is used to automate redundant, mundane, and time-consuming processes. These can include various tasks depending on the industry. Through its automation capabilities, RPA allows organizations to tackle operational challenges such as executing large amounts of back-end processes. RPA allows disparate business units within an organization to customize solutions which rapidly digitize tasks, delivering significant and sustainable value in short timeframes while reducing overall risks. Project owners can automate and deliver repetitive tasks by building and deploying intelligent operations at the business unit level. RPA helps organizations achieve efficiency while maintaining flexibility. RPA is most sought for in processes such as accounting and finance, HR, and claims processing. Not just automation, but RPA helps organizations with an opportunity to rethink their operational ecosystem, and redesign it end-to-end to enhance its productivity.

RPA and Digital Transformation

The objective of initiating digital transformation with RPA could vary from cost optimization to replacing labour with machines. RPA also enables to drive consistency and compliance in the business. Let’s look at how RPA helps organization to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and productivity.

1. Existing Process Automation: Evaluate current processes with an end-to-end, cross-functional lens and maximize automation across processes.
2. System Agnostic: RPA is system-agnostic, which means that it can work with legacy systems, and external systems without the need to restructure existing platforms.
3. Productivity: Evaluate process dependencies between the traditional and digital workforce and schedule RPA solutions intelligently to optimize uptime without disrupting business continuity.
4. Maximizing Manpower: Removing the burden of back-office tasks, RPA allows employees to then focus on more strategic and high-level tasks. This allows the teams to focus on high-priority tasks improving business performance and outcomes, which can help in achieving digital transformation faster.
5. Better Compliance: Consider applying automation to processes in order to create a complete digital trail and improve controls for tasks that are otherwise too labour-intensive to fully audit.
6. Cost Optimization: Automating redundant processes means that the incumbent workforce can now work on processes and projects that were, otherwise, outsourced to third parties. This helps organization with more control on their business processes and their outcomes.

In conclusion, the increase in efficiency and productivity provided by RPA is allowing the emphasis to be moved from tedious back-office tasks to processes that facilitate better business value and customer engagement. RPA is certainly an important avenue through which digital transformation can be achieved by any organization.

If you have just embarked on your digital transformation journey, identifying redundant processes, or knowing where to start can be challenging. This is where Managed Services Providers (MSPs) can help you to take your first step towards digital transformation with their automation capabilities. By understanding your ICT landscape and identifying redundant processes, MSPs can re-imagine your existing processes and help you to devise a process automation charter based on your business objectives. This automation adds value in terms of business user experience with applications and processes, and enhances efficiency and productivity to augment return on technology investments.