How RPA Can Save The World

Benefits transcend more than just pure automation.

RPA has shown tremendous promise to innovate within the enterprise. The potential is impossible to fully determine or comprehend - thus the horizon is very bright for this innovative frontier.

Every industry can be touched, every size organization can be enhanced, and even the individual consumer stands to benefit. Given the scope to innovate and help address fundamental business challenges, an open landscape exists to drive new solutions and approaches to modern problems.

Innovative Themes that can help the World

1. Health and Telemedicine

Health and telemedicine can benefit from improved data quality, improved coordination, reducing process choke points and soothing burdensome tasks tagged inefficiently to highly skilled professionals such as doctors. An interesting use case is to staff telemedicine 'command centers' with RPA skilled analysts. As an example, in place of a doctor needing to watch over a monitor (such as a remote EKG feed, and requiring 1:1 attention), RPA can monitor and track literally hundreds of monitors at once. When an issue is found, the doctor can be alerted and have their attention drawn to where it is needed. This saves the doctor time and energy since the burden of data gathering and analysis is heavily reduced.

2. Scaling to Resourcing Demands

In times of resource challenges, RPA can kick in to assist maintaining business operations. This could be a pandemic situation, environmental disaster or more tactically to cover for sick or holiday leave. Similar to how 'overnight phones' manage an aspect of out of hours telecommunications, processes and procedures can be organically modified as needed to accommodate operational demand shifts that may otherwise cause problems. Delayed payments, transactional backlogs, data accuracy impacts all can impact both top and bottom line norms.

3. Enhancing Themes of Sustainability and Diversity

RPA can aid various themes of sustainability. Balancing work hours, managing human performance, managing diversity, overcoming technology gaps through the extensibility impact of RPA on existing solutions. With the rich functional nature of RPA, organizations can also reduce their asset footprint by cutting down on excessive functionality they are forced to procure. The security benefit also is that a more consistent stack can be maintained with a more condensed software footprint.

4. Productivity

Naturally, RPA provides unique benefits to bolster productivity throughput. Most automation depends on in place API's, standard integrations, and standard application capabilities. However RPA has a distinct advantage over other forms of automation. It is like the putty between the standard automation 'bricks', bridging gaps and solving salient issues. It doesn't stop there. By providing a proceduralized human like interaction capability, new ways of coordinating systems are created. Increasing the pace of typical human-centric workloads literally creates new time, which also redirects humans toward activities where humans are strong. This includes decision making, and away from mundane tasks, such as data quality review and validation and raises levels of quality of outcome, service and product.

5. Data Intelligence

RPA has the impact of improving the state of data within the organization. Erroneous data is quarantined, accurate data can be enhanced and promoted, data timing challenges can be overcome, and meaningful intelligence can be presented in real or near time and presented more simply. The cost of poor data intelligence has actually been estimated at 3 Trillion per year* in the United States alone, which highlights the nature of data as a double edged sword. Scaling down to the organizational level; substantial progress can be made to drive both topline and bottom line gains as a result of stronger data intelligence to improve sales, efficiency, and better manage internal risks.

Taking Action - The basics of getting started

With the above 5 key areas outlined, RPA can still be overwhelming and Enstarla recommends starting small to get some initial traction with the right steps. Where to start? Consider driving conversations across the following three focus points.

1. Where there is a spreadsheet, there is RPA opportunity

Flat files can accumulate and form a growing web of disparate data sources, driving manual effort increases unilaterally. RPA can aid solving pain points from leveraging these flat files and consolidate them into a more robust and sustainable solution that saves time, money and energy.

2. Timing and throughput - there is always a faster way with RPA

RPA is able to bridge technology and process gaps to iron out bottlenecks and increase workload processing. When it is after hours, look for ways that RPA can get a jump on the next day's activities. It is also good for workforce morale.

3. Consider tactically, but rethink broadly across the ecosystem

RPA alone is great, but building an ecosystem that enables RPA is simply better. Similar to creating a new human position in an organization, supporting processes and governance need to be in place to drive productivity, efficiency and quality for your RPA bots. When adopting RPA, ensuring an ecosystem design mindset is taken improves solution robustness, reduces total cost of ownership and allows the RPA to remain agile and in lock step with the pace of IT change over time.

Sources and References:

*IBM, 2016 (https://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/infographic/four-vs-big-data)