Robotic process automation (RPA) is often – understandably – associated with cost savings. At a fairly simplistic level, it’s possible to view RPA simply as a way to replace human salaries. If a business is paying 20 people to carry out the same repetitive task every day, before replacing those people with one robot that automates the process, there’s a clear cost saving that can be easily calculated.
Financial savings are indeed one of the major benefits of RPA – but they don’t tell the whole story. And, even purely from a financial perspective, the benefits of RPA stretch far beyond simply calculating the salaries of the human workforce.
Additionally, despite the fear that RPA could result in job losses, the technology can in fact elevate jobs, while boosting demand for roles within AI. It can empower people to focus their efforts on more rewarding tasks requiring human creativity and empathy, which no machine can replace.
Realizing the real RPA potential
Businesses making smart use of RPA can generate powerful bottom line benefits. Beyond the immediate saving of automating a task, there’s also a financial benefit to freeing up human employees to focus on more complex or interesting work.
With teams no longer burdened by more menial and repetitive tasks, they can reallocate their time towards work that requires human creativity and empathy. This can boost businesses financially not just through the resulting solutions, but also the added productivity and value generated by employees enjoying greater job satisfaction as a result of more stimulating work.
Avoiding human error
The elimination of human error is another major advantage of RPA. Robots don’t get tired and make mistakes at the end of a long day in the same way that people do. Errors with data entry can clearly have major consequences across all industries. Within medical and pharmaceutical organizations, mistakes could even be deadly. The business value of automating processes in a reliable, replicable error-free way cannot be underestimated.
Scaling the organization
Access to talent is one of the major challenges that prevents businesses scaling to their full potential. Businesses can even have the financial strength and new business pipeline to justify expansion and still find their ambitions thwarted simply because they are unable to hire and train people quickly enough.
RPA has a crucial role to play here. Once a process has been defined, it takes seconds to train an additional robot and copy files from one robot to the next.
Immediate benefits
Also key to RPA is the speed at which the benefits it offers can be realized. RPA technology can be introduced without any need to adapt existing systems and can be up and running immediately, delivering cost savings, eliminating error and increasing capacity to scale the business.
As a result, it should be no surprise that a recent Forrester report commissioned by UiPath found that some 66% of businesses plan to increase RPA software spend over the next 12 months.
Technology rarely delivers such value with such little business interruption. From a cost, employee satisfaction, employee productivity, error minimizing and business scaling perspective, RPA represents an incredible opportunity to realize powerful business benefits immediately.
