03 Jan, 2019 | Blogs
Automation, strengthened by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analysis, is transforming every organization and industry, globally. While operational efficiency is a key driver, the benefits of automation are far greater than just cost savings. Whether improving product and service quality, increasing customer satisfaction, enhancing the quality of work for employees, or mining growing volumes of data for insights, automation is being adopted faster than ever before.
Taking the Robot Out of the Human
Gartner predicts that by 2020, 40 percent of large enterprises will have adopted Robotic Process Automation (RPA), up from less than 10 percent today. McKinsey’s research found that automating the HR onboarding process shrunk the onboarding time by 50 percent and the cost by 80 percent. Recent research from the London School of Economics suggests that businesses can realize more than 500% of ROI from automation, by making business processes more efficient and cost-effective, while also enhancing the quality of human work.
Today, we spend about 10 to 20 percent of our time on mundane, repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. With RPA, businesses can offload these cumbersome tasks to a digital workforce, giving human workers more time to be productive and work on creative projects. According to Forbes, automation will save employees six to nine weeks of effort each year, saving businesses four million dollars annually. This recovered time can be reinvested into career development and personal growth opportunities, making work more human.
However, driving the adoption of RPA enterprise-wide can be time-consuming.
Scaling Automation Enterprise-Wide
While more and more companies are adopting RPA, they are unable to expand their automation footprint fast enough. According to McKinsey, about 60 percent of all occupations have at least 30 percent of activities that are technically automatable, based on currently demonstrated technologies. However, a recent Deloitte report suggests that only 3 percent of large enterprises today have more than 50 bots in production.
One of the primary reasons is that RPA projects are currently structured around critical tasks and tactical process implementations. Scaling RPA organization-wide involves identifying a cross-functional team to map business processes and deploying developers to build bots. Complex business processes can take several months to automate, slowing down the realization of ROI from automation.
What if businesses could better align automation initiatives around human roles rather than business processes or tasks? What if pre-packaged human-centric automation functionality could be crowd-sourced and deployed from an ecosystem of process and automation experts through an online marketplace?