Answering 5 Common RPA Questions
It’s the end of 2021 and as we look towards the future and analyze our past performance, one question always comes to mind: “What could we have done better?”.
The answer to that question is not always straightforward and might require a bit of lateral thinking, given that most of us are in a place where we think we got all our processes sorted out and improvement would require massive investment.
Understanding the role of RPA
While that holds true in some cases, the solution for improvement might be hidden in the details of your employees’ day-to-day activities. Repetitive processes that don’t require much cognitive effort (such as form filling or moving data from one place to another) can waste massive amounts of time and effort.
Enter RPA, also known as, the trusty Robot Workforce. The main point that we always emphasize when it comes to Process Automating Robots is that they are not here to “steal jobs”, but rather help people find time for what is actually important in their day-to-day activity. They do that by doing the work that “needs to be done” with astounding speed and efficiency.
While RPA is no longer new on the market, it is still an emerging technology that can be easily misunderstood by business owners. On that note let’s focus on answering the most common questions we get as RPA providers.
Do I really need RPA to scale my business?
The honest answer to that question is No…If you run your business in the 1990’s. While you don’t actually need RPA to succeed in your business, it definitely is a useful tool for accelerating business growth and development. Efficiency studies [1] have shown that 86% of business leaders that have adopted RPA technologies in their processes have reported an increase in productivity while 90% of them have agreed that RPA met or exceeded expectations when it came to improving quality and accuracy. In short, while your organization will remain the same size, one common side-effect of RPA adoption might be an increase in general productivity and quality of services.
Isn’t it expensive? It is true that automation comes at a price. Depending on your needs, prices can vary, but at no point should it exceed 18 months ROI in order for your business to experience the benefits of automation. New software and technologies are constantly appearing in the field of RPA so, with the right guidance, you might find yourself paying way less than you expected for a robot that will improve your business.
How long does it take to implement? RPA implementations won’t be ready in minutes, but they will definitely take less time than training new employees for the same tasks, over and over again. Depending on the length of your processes and the difficulty of tasks performed implementation times can vary from a few weeks to a few months. That being said there is no rule that doesn’t allow partially completed Process Robots to be deployed in order to solve smaller tasks, before completing the bigger picture.
How reliable is the robot? Robots are programmed to perform a specific set of actions at maximum efficiency. As long at the process remains unchanged and the input data that the robot receives remains the same, the robot will always perform reliably and deliver the intended result every time.
How fast can I expect ROI? Let’s first start with how you would even go about calculating RPA ROI. One of the most basic formulas for ROI = Cost of RPA Automation – (Hours Spent on Performing the Process Manually * Cost of Manual Labor). In our experience, RPA ROI should be measured in weeks/months. A typical implementation usually should start producing visible financial results within 6 to 12 months.