Diego Lomanto, Vice President of Product Marketing at UiPath, a Robotic Process Automation solutions provider, offers a contemporary perspective on how organizations can effectively use RPA and hyperautomation to quickly adapt to changing business conditions, ensure resiliency and business continuity, and scale digital transformation efforts.
Digital transformation has been a topic of conversation for years. And while there’s been much discussion about the value of adopting digital solutions across the enterprise, many companies have been slow to optimize their digital transformation efforts. Some may even say digital transformation has failed. According to a 2018 reportOpens a new window from McKinsey, only 16% of respondents say digital transformations have successfully improved performance in their organizations, and 7% say that performance improved but that those improvements were not sustained. Even among digitally savvy industries, such as high tech, media and telecom, the digital transformation success rate has not exceeded 26%.
With top-line revenue being significantly impacted by COVID-19, however, businesses are rethinking their digital transformation approaches to keep the revenue machine running and enable cost efficiencies in anticipation of an economic downturn. These organizations need the agility to quickly respond to changing business conditions while hardening their processes to ensure business continuity during macro-economic shocks.
As organizations look to retool their businesses for a more digitally enabled world, CIOs and other technical leaders are increasingly exploring the role Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can play in driving and scaling digital transformation efforts.
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RPA Enables the Speed and Adaptability Required for Changing Business Conditions
As organizations increasingly require models that allow for faster and more flexible operations, RPA has proven to be a highly valuable tool. In healthcare, RPA Opens a new window is automating COVID-19 test results and freeing up nurses to spend more time caring for infected patients. In financial services, banks are using RPA to assist representatives with a flood of inquiries regarding the Payroll Protection Program. And in retail and commerce, the technology is being used to keep up with hiring and training demands for essential workers, and to manage the increase in inquiries to call centers that are operating remotely.
None of these conditions were present just six months ago. But with the pandemic forcing rapid adaptation, RPA Opens a new window has allowed organizations across industries to swiftly respond to new internal and external demands. Because of its ease of use and simplicity in automation Opens a new window deployment, RPA empowers organizations to bypass the lengthy development cycles that previous digital transformation efforts required and maintain continuity amid drastic change.
Learn More: Robotic Process Automation: What is it Good For?Opens a new window
RPA Facilitates Resiliency and Business Continuity
And while RPA Opens a new window has allowed organizations to quickly respond to unforeseen conditions, CIOs are increasingly investing in automation and deploying it at scale to ensure that their businesses are optimized for what is becoming a true digital era. No CIO wants to be unprepared and so many are now taking strides to ensure they never find themselves scrambling to get online and operate as needed again. In fact, Forrester recently issued a report that projects that risk and resilience awareness take on a broader scope in the aftermath of COVID-19, causing the adoption of automation to take on a new urgency. CIOs will look to automation to mitigate the risks that future crises pose to the supply and productivity of human workers. Additionally, the technology will allow workers to perform more efficiently even while working remotely, as RPA bots handle processes they may not be properly equipped to perform during a crisis.
To quote a member of UiPath’s customer advisory board, “during the height of the crisis, the things that went wrong were the things that relied on paper. We are digitizing and automating every paper process we have.â€
Automation is a reliable technology that can back us up if people are not available and enable employees to work more efficiently. Of course, introducing automation is just as much a cultural shift as it is a technological shift, so it is imperative that organizations consider the proper change management techniques and training opportunities to ensure their RPA investments deliver maximum business impact.
Developing Business Speed and Resiliency Through a Culture of Automation
There are many factors to consider when implementing automationOpens a new window , including choosing an automation partner, determining which processes to automate, and establishing an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE). As companies seek to adopt the technology, it is perhaps most critical that they secure the support of their employees.
It starts at the C-level. There must be a commitment to this by executives. Ideally, there is a sponsor or champion at the highest levels of the organization that owns the success. Most importantly, they must have incentives to see it through.
Employees must also be given the opportunity to either build their own robot or work with company-supplied robots to drive adoption and increase productivity from the bottom-up. If companies are to undergo digital transformationOpens a new window driven by RPA, the entire company needs to be on board and involved. With a culture of automation, teams are driven to collaborate on a shared vision to unite siloed departments.
This creates powerful positive feedback from teams, which generates buy-in from others across the enterprise. As deployments are scaled, a feedback loop is built that expands the technologies internally and instills digital transformation Opens a new window as a key company value. This is how the full potential of an employee is unlocked.
According to a 2019 Forrester survey of business decision-makers, exposing employees to RPA can be beneficial to not only the company’s performance, but to individual employees, as well. 66% of those surveyed said that by restructuring work, RPA enables employees to have more human interactions, and 60% said RPA helps employees focus on more meaningful, strategic tasks. Additionally, a new survey from UiPath found that 68% of workers believe automation can increase productivity and save time in their day-to-day, and a significant majority of workers would like their employers to offer changes to learn new skills such as RPA development. Not only can this boost employee satisfaction and productivity, it can also drive the ROI of digital technology investments by increasing utilization and driving greater business performance.
With a human-centric change management process, organizations can drive their digital transformation efforts while ensuring that employees feel secure, valued, and even more satisfied in their positions.
Expanding the Automation Umbrella with Hyperautomation
Up to this point, organizations have mostly automated highly repetitive back-office functions such as data entry and analysis, invoicing, and claims processing. However, organizations looking to scale projects to automate more complex tasks have an opportunity to turn to hyperautomation. Hyperautomation is defined by GartnerOpens a new window as “the application of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to increasingly automate processes and augment humans.†Hyperautomation builds on the momentum of RPA to further release workers from the mundane and repetitive tasks holding them back in the workplace. Furthermore, it enables them to do it with speed. That speed provides the agility needed to respond fast to future disruptions.
It starts with adding tools to scientifically discover what to automate by looking at both how employees work, and applications are used across the enterprise. Hyperautomation allows CIOs Opens a new window to extend the use cases for automation by leveraging AI skills such as document understanding, to drive more automated workflows. By leveraging AIOpens a new window , organizations can bring decision-making capabilities to software robots so that they can be increasingly flexible and interact with data in a variety of ever more complex processes with less human involvement. It also provides the tools for employees to fully engage with automation, whether that is through crowdsourcing ideas or building their own robots. Finally, it provides the analytic tools to assess the impact of automation on the business and create an automation flywheel by leveraging that data to find even more automation opportunities.
In the past few months, CIOs have been faced with a unique challenge that provides for unique opportunities. RPA can help organizations bring digital transformationOpens a new window plans once on the back burner to the forefront of their strategies, enabling adaptability, resiliency and business continuity across the organization.
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