Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology practice many businesses utilize to automate repetitive processes in their business life. Given the volume of data, businesses generate daily, fully manual labor is becoming impossible, especially for small businesses and startups.
In a data summary published on LinkedIn, Gartner indicated that 72% of organizations plan to invest in RPA in the next two years. Additional findings indicate that 53% of businesses have already started down the RPA journey. These data points indicate that businesses are more than ready to adopt RPA solutions.
RPA can transform the way you manage your business if you choose to automate the right processes and applications. In doing so, you will be free to focus on more pressing matters and enjoy the fruits of RPA-generated results. Let’s discuss the business processes commonly associated with RPA and how they can help manage your business more efficiently in 2021 and beyond.
1. Sales Order Processing
Processing purchase orders, whether you operate as a SaaS company or an online store, is an essential part of servicing your customers and clients. This requires an immense amount of precision on your part, as improperly processed orders can result in wrong or outright missing items for your customers.
Automating your sales ordering process through RPA would allow you to only work with fully processed orders instead. An RPA solution can automate sales entries and generate invoices for clients, help verify customers’ data and make the database as neat as possible, and save your sales team’s time. In doing so, it would allow you to focus on managing and developing your business rather than manually processing each sale order as it comes.
2. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Data Processing
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an important and quite common process to automate in a business. Using ERP management solutions requires time and patience from your finance, HR, and supply teams.
However, an RPA solution would mitigate the margin for error in ERP data processing and allow you to have a clear overview of your business’ resources. Logging and validating data and presenting it to you as finished documents can be made possible through RPA, saving you countless hours of manual labor. As a result, your ERP database will always be clean and in compliance with your business’ data standards.
3. Customer Service
Customer support services are an essential part of any serious business. However, customer service processes take time and resources, not to mention the upkeep necessary to maintain an entire support department in your business. Using RPA in customer servicing can minimize ticket processing errors, improve your agents’ performance, and make data processing and indexing more efficient.
This will make your customers happier and lead them to advocate for your brand to their social circles, such as in the case of college students. Students who are short on time may think “I need someone to write my paper instead of me” and reach out to a professional service. With RPA, responding to such queries and directing customers to the right part of your website is quicker, easier, and more intuitive.
4. Staff Payment Processing
Paying your staff consistently and on time is extremely important for the sake of employee productivity and morale. Instead of assigning tasks to your HR and accountants to perform these operations every month, using up their time, you can rely on RPA instead.
RPA can standardize your payment processing and ensure that no staff member is left without income each month. A well-designed RPA software bot will validate each employee’s records to ensure their compliance with company work standards before processing their payments. The same setup can be applied to your staff’s insurance, bonuses, and other payments through various RPA systems designed based on different triggers.
5. Business Expense Overview
Similar to your staff’s payments, your business will have expenses and liabilities related to its continued operation. Setting up RPA will allow you to automatically collect invoices and receipts from banks, financial institutions, and companies you work with.
This will free up your accounting department’s time and allow them to more easily tag and store different invoices. Managing your business’ expenses in this manner is far more straightforward and allows for a better overview of your cash flow in long term. In turn, you will be able to plan your business’ finances, investments, and growth with more concrete information in hand than ever before.
Determining Whether a Process is Eligible for RPA
Now that we’ve taken a closer look at some of the processes you can automate using RPA, let’s discuss how to detect such processes yourself. There are several clear indicators of whether a process can and should be automated to help your business and not detract from its performance.
According to Gartner, 90% of organizations and businesses worldwide will adopt RPA by 2022 as it objectively improves critical business process performances. As such, it’s the right time to adopt RPA in whichever manner is suitable for your business. If a process within your business ticks the following boxes, it may be eligible for RPA and thus make your business much easier to manage.
- The process is stable and mature enough that you can predict the type of data it will generate
- The process is rule-based, meaning that you know which steps are necessary to complete it successfully
- The process is repeatable and requires a high volume of repetition, making it time-consuming for your staff
- The process is not changeable and won’t result in wild data variations as a result of an agile workflow
- The process can generate readable data which your staff can use, such as in MS Word or PDF form
- The process is worth automating due to its return-on-investment (ROI) potential compared to manual labor
Using Comidor RPA to Enhance your Business Automation (Conclusion)
Robotic Process Automation is challenging without the know-how or the tools to properly automate your business operations. Using Comidor RPA software with access to professional customer support and a UI designed for automation is recommended. Doing so will save you precious time and resources, and allow you to start automating your business processes much faster and more efficiently.
No two businesses are alike and there are no clear automation rules– depending on your industry and niche, different processes will be eligible for automation. Regardless, once you dip your toes into RPA, going back to a fully manual workflow won’t even cross your mind.
Author’s bio
Jessica Fender is a copywriter and blogger with a background in marketing and sales. She enjoys sharing her experience with like-minded professionals who aim to provide customers with high-quality services
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