Imagine you’re a regional manager of a large multinational corporation. At a recent business conference, you hear about a new technology capable of completing manual data entry at 20 to 30 times the speed of your average employee!
Would you be interested in this? For Cherie Sim, Group Financial Controller at OWNDAYS, a fast-growing Japanese eyewear retailer, the answer was a resounding YES!
Freeing Up Valuable Man-hours
Prior to discovering this technology, Ms Sim needed a full-time employee to manually transfer transaction data from digital receipts to their in-house ERP system. This took her employee 8 hours a day.
Due to the detailed and laborious nature of the job, human errors are inevitable and reconciling them required an additional 2 hours of a senior employee.
That’s 10 hours a day of man-hours wasted which over a year adds up to 3500 hours lost! For Ms Cherie, investing in this new technology was therefore a no-brainer.
Introducing Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-growing technology that according to Deloitte will be universally adopted across all companies in the coming years.
Essentially, RPA is a software robot that can read, extract, process, and input data of all kinds by switching in-between apps the same way a human would. Except RPA does all of these tasks at speeds and accuracies incomparable to humans.
Unlike their human counterparts, RPA bots also don’t require coffee breaks or the occasional stretching and office chit-chat. In fact, they can work 24/7 around the clock. At OWNDAYS, for instance, RPAs now perform tasks well into the night so that in the morning, employees can jump straight into more high-level tasks such as analysing sales trends and planning marketing campaigns.
Is RPA a Good Fit For You?
Although you might be tempted to invest in RPA right off the bat, as with all other new and innovative technologies, RPA adoption requires careful consideration and planning.
First of all, you should begin by verifying if these are true for your organisation:
- Are numerous manhours being spent on repetitive tasks (e.g. data entry, invoice tracking, inventory management, customer service, etc.)?
- Do these tasks have a simplistic nature to them (e.g. copy-pasting, simple mathematical operations, cross-verification, etc.)?
- Can a process flow diagram be created for a robot to automate these tasks?
If the answers to the above are yes, chances are that RPA would be a great solution for you!
So What Do You Do Next?
A few RPA solutions exist on the market, but you might not have the time to spend evaluating and picking up an involved piece of technology. Fret not. Talk to us to discuss your situation, and we can help put together a short training programme so employees on the ground are empowered to suggest how RPA might fit into your business processes. Furthermore, we work closely with CFB Bots, a leading RPA specialist in the region, and together we can help you customise and implement RPA solutions that meet the particular needs of your team.