How could RPA help your business grow?

05 Dec How could RPA help your business grow?

As the world becomes increasingly technologically advanced, new powerful technologies and processes are developed to take advantage of the benefits of virtualisation. Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the largest examples of this.

With 67% of businesses using automation for their organisation’s benefit, there’s no question that RPA is a hugely important innovation for the modern business landscape. But, a large question is how can it help your business thrive and prosper in the long term.

We believe that RPA is one of the key factors in helping your business truly succeed. That’s why in this article, we’re going to take you through what RPA is and how it can help your business grow.

What is RPA (Robotic process automation)?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the use of robotic software to emulate and replicate human tasks.

As advancements have been made in robotics and virtualised intelligence over the past couple of decades, RPA has been developed to be able to do tedious and repetitive tasks that can waste so much time.

RPA (Robotic process automation) can also be used to help improve customer experience and ensure smooth operations throughout a whole company. For example, Swedish furniture store IKEA uses Power Automate — Microsoft’s popular RPA tool — to condense and simplify their user experience whilst ensuring everything operates smoothly.

In IKEA’s system, once a co-worker hits start or end on an appointment, a flow is started to automatically record the meeting’s length and update its status. With this, text message notifications are sent to customers using Azure Functions and Logic Apps.

This saves time and ensures that simple processes are done correctly and consistently, which in turn creates a better user experience for the company. It also helps ensure that each customer has the same positive experience throughout the company.

Furthermore, this is just one use case of RPA to improve a business’s operations. The flexibility of automation technology means that no matter your business, RPA can truly help your business prosper — whether it be for replicating internal processes or improving customer retention.

Benefits of RPA (RPA)

Optimise Resource Usage

Every business has a limit of resources that it can use at any given time. After all, resources cost money — and using resources to ensure tasks are completed to a standard can be a waste of time when RPA can easily do that for you.

Using automation to complete tasks that would otherwise be done by your employees means that said employees can focus on more important tasks, instead of wasting their time — which inadvertently wastes your time and money.

It doesn’t just end there, though. Automation also greatly reduces the need for human intervention, as it completes the same task repeatedly without variance or error. These resources can also be allocated elsewhere.

Reduce Costs

Having your employees do work that can easily be automated is an obvious way to hemorrhage money, but automation can also reduce costs elsewhere.

Tools like Microsoft’s Power Automate are based on cloud infrastructure, which means that the work can take place without having to dedicate physical hardware to it — whereas a person doing those tasks would need a computer to work at and possibly other hardware.

Implementation of RPA isn’t very expensive either. Rather than having to get an organisation-wide system up and running and then training users to complete tasks to get started with a process, getting started with Power Automate takes a few simple steps and is generally more cost-efficient.

Empower Workforce

Your employees don’t want to do boring, repetitive tasks that take up time and effort.

By automating these processes, you will motivate your workforce to become more productive and proactive, allowing them to work more efficiently on things they can excel and innovate at.

With this, your team will naturally have higher morale and feel more empowered to work.

Eliminate Human Error

As previously mentioned, automation completely eliminates human error and greatly reduces the need for human intervention. This is because automation allows you to repeat tasks infinitely and ensure each task is completed the exact same every time.

Humans just cannot repeat tasks in the exact same way each time, which is why automation is so strong in this aspect. Reducing human error means that your company is going to operate more smoothly and efficiently throughout.

Enable Scalability

RPA allows you to infinitely scale the processes they’re automated with great efficiency. Instead of having to hire more people to complete those tasks, RPA instead just lets you replicate the process any number of times — with the only limitation possibly being the cloud solution you’re using. This is also scalable, however.

This means that RPA is key to any company wanting to grow and scale and that any organisation wanting to move to the next level will need to make use of automation somewhere.

Improve Communication

Whilst automating business processes, RPA can also be used to automate communication processes. This can make communication easier and ensure important facts are communicated efficiently and effectively, with no miscommunications and mistakes occurring.

For example, New York medical service Visiting Nurse Service & Hospice of Suffolk (VNSHS) uses Power Automate to be able to automate communication throughout their whole system.

VNSHS’s System Specialist, Alvin Ledwidge, says “By using Microsoft Power Automate, we’ve made processes for the first-line staff a lot faster. They worry less about who’s on the email—they simply fill out a workflow form and know that the right staff and supervisors will be automatically included.”

How to get started (RPA)

RPA has many benefits to improving your company’s growth and workflow and is the best tool for any business to propel itself into the digital era. Rather than having to worry about human error and wasting resources on mundane tasks, you can instead use a robust, scalable process to ensure everything gets done.

Microsoft’s RPA tool — Power Automate — is a great place to get started. Its power and efficiency have meant that it’s made a quick rise towards the top of the RPA world. Furthermore, with complete 365, Teams, and Azure integration, integrating Power Automate into your workflow is simple.

Are you ready to implement RPA in your organisation? Contact us and see how we can help!