In organisations, commercial and not, some tasks are repetitive in nature. Examples of such tasks are invoice settlement, opening customer/supplier records and basic queries from customers, back-office financial reconciliations, filling of forms, moving files, and many more.
As the organisation grows, so do the volumes of such tasks, from a few transactions a day, all the way to thousands or more a day. This increases the workload for personnel involved, and handling it can quickly become a significant effort, consuming a substantial number of worker hours if done manually. Furthermore, it diverts human resources that could well be dedicated to more value-adding activities.
From employees’ perspective, non-engaging repetitive tasks can become dull as well as error-prone. This often leads to staff turnover in roles or departments with such type of work.
It does not have to be this way, as technology-based tools exist to address such scenarios. Such tools come in different flavours, depending on the vendor they originate from. However, the common theme among them is automation. Some names vendors use include business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), also known as software robotics, as well as intelligent automation.
In essence, however, these tools provide a means to mimic back-office tasks of human workers. They allow organisations to build and configure an automated workflow, for instance, to automatically fill in forms or move files, from one process stage to the next, and run seamlessly within the business systems and processes. At a high level, these systems provide the following functionality: Automation scripting-building tools, requiring no or low code; tools used for configuration, document flow, monitoring and security; integration with other enterprise applications, such as financial systems (enterprise resource planning).
Significant investment needs to be carried out by specialised experts for these tools to be properly integrated and implemented within an organisation. Also, one must not underestimate the considerable amount of effort from the recipient organisation in terms of documenting existing processes and data to be manipulated at each stage of the process.
Thus, before an organisation embarks on such a project, it is imperative to consider the investment involved as compared to current processes in order to ascertain the threshold to be reached in terms of return on investment.
To properly compare, often a comparison is done in terms of cost per document processed. So, on the one hand, there are costs involved in setting up and running a system; while on the other, one needs to quantify the current number of document transactions processed and also correctly factor in the all costs involved in processing such documents with current manual process, such as labour costs and current software costs, and how much of these costs are involved in processing documents, and hence calculate the cost per document.
With this information, one can make an informed decision on whether to invest in the system, taking into account the current workload scenario as well as the envisioned medium-term future scenario with an increase in capacity taken into account.
Once such a system is operating within an organisation, it offloads repetitive work from staff, thus allowing them to focus on more value-adding work, while also increasing overall capacity at the organisational level, besides improving accuracy, streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.
In other words, such a system lets staff be creative and human and add value, rather than makes them become machines.
Such a system lets staff be creative and human and add value, rather than makes them become machines
Finally, beyond the direct and quantifiable operational cost savings, less-easily quantifiable factors, such as personnel engagement and possibly higher talent retention, can surely benefit organisations that invest in such systems, especially in times like these.
This article was prepared by collating various publicly available online sources.