Technology enables automation, scalability and grants transparency to the process. The combination of these elements has ensured that technology firms constantly explore and improvise any/all possible avenues to be enabled through technology.
The technology from a consumer point of view makes it very impactful and exciting but an equal or a large technology intervention happens at the backend process to make the client interface appear so dramatic. Backend process automation is detrimental to the overall outcome of an organization, be it a service, product, or online interface.
In addition, the organizations need to constantly look at scaling up while minimizing the use of resources. This includes the cost of acquiring new clients, managing the growth scale while reducing the overall fixed cost ratio in the firm’s P&L.
Traditionally, in such a scenario the option with firms is to upskill their staff to increase yield. This has a multi-level impact both positive and negative. The trained staff delivers well but may not necessarily strengthen the process laid for the delivery. The issue lies with the single-spoke approach where we look for delivery from human resources even for the deliveries which are repetitive and mundane in nature. This leads to the constant need for skill gaps management as the trained staff moves for better opportunities. From a company’s goal-perspective training and upskilling of the staff is imperative, the challenge lies in offering the team opportunities to meet their aspiration as they learn more!
However, technology has served this cause very well. Backend automation and using programs to automate repetitive and mundane tasks ensure we reduce this gap to the minimum. Staff then get to spend more time in value creation rather than working on backend clerical work which with the right set of inputs could have been using a robotic program.
Companies are turning to an emerging technology practice called robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline enterprise operations and reduce costs & human errors. With RPA, businesses can automate mundane rules-based business processes, enabling business users to devote more time to serving customers or other higher-value work.
Using RPA tools, a company can configure software, or a ‘robot’ to capture and interpret applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems. RPA scenarios range from something as simple as generating an automatic response to an email to deploying thousands of bots, each programmed to automate jobs in an ERP system.
This includes bank reconciliation processes, client invoicing, the creation of vendor purchase orders, and other processes.
An RPA is based on system-specific keywords which can either be fetched by a user or as an output of an ERP/SAP system. These keywords are picked up by the Bot to create a pre-designated action. This enables the related stakeholders with real-time reports which are available on the go.
Going forward all these mundane tasks and also the tasks coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning will further add to the automation process making the overall end-user delivery more robust and reliable.
