Here’s exactly how much time RPA helps companies save
AUTOMATION is critical to organizations in this day and age, especially at a time when digital transformation is front and center for the board.
The easiest route to automation for most businesses is robotic process automation (RPA). In functions such as human resources, finance, marketing, and operations.
RPA is easy to implement, affordable even for the smallest of SMEs, and usually ranks high on employee adoption compared to more aggressive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT)-driven data platforms.
Despite these benefits, it’s hard to really imagine the results that RPA can produce.
Take a small team of 6 accountants in the finance division for example. RPA can automate the digitization of incoming invoices by adding entries to the company’s accounting package — but does it really boost productivity?
According to case studies of companies that have actually deployed RPA solutions, there’s actually strong evidence to suggest that there’s a lot that companies gain from the technology:
A global healthcare technology company with a presence in nearly 100 countries set out to automate 300 processes and aimed to save 900,000 man hours in finance accounting operations (record to report, order to cash, and procure to pay).
The team expected to automate another 80 processes in the financial planning and analysis (reporting and consolidation activities) workflow to save a cumulative 30,000 man hours.
Over the course of a year, working with an RPA technology vendor, the company was able to automate 140 processes with about 200 bots running round the clock. As a result, the team helped the finance accounting operations team save 400,000 man hours and the financial planning and analysis team save 23,500 man hours on average.
Zurich, a global insurance company with 54,000 employees in 210 countries and territories caters to individuals, SMEs, and large enterprises for a variety of purposes.
Automation, especially RPA, can definitely help such a company quickly improve its operations to climb the digital maturity curve and deliver a better service to customers across tiers.
Through the project, the insurer also wanted to achieve a US$1 billion of cost improvements.
Working with an international consulting giant, Zurich was able to deliver cost savings and service improvements across countless processes, whilst releasing up to 25 percent of operational team capacity to staff a new robotic center of excellence.
What’s key to their efforts, and long term success, is their creation of a robotic center of excellence — which will ensure their RPA projects continue to deliver improved results.
