Automation to Maximize your Existing Skills

Here are three ways robotic process automation (RPA) can help you develop a talent force from your workforce.

Employee satisfaction has an impact on corporate success, as expected. Organizations in the top quartile of employee engagement have 21% higher productivity and 22% higher profitability than those in the worst quartile, according to a Gallup study. Automation certain processes can further enhance employee engagement and productivity, contributing to overall success.

Because they spend too much time on repetitive tasks that could and should be automated, such as data entry, running reports, or creating email chains, many talented knowledge workers are still unable to fully engage in the right work—work that is important for professional and personal success, work that only humans can do.

Let’s face it, if our time and attention are being divided, it will be challenging to successfully apply critical thinking, creativity, or sophisticated problem-solving skills to our work—skills included in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Study 2020 as three of the top 15 job talents for 2025. Even if we have more knowledge and experience, competitors who have more time and resources to plan and prepare for a competitive advantage may outperform us.

Here are three ways businesses are adopting RPA to give their teams more time to strategize and prepare better than their competitors.

1. Get the managers away from their desks by automation

Primanti Brothers, a popular US restaurant business, liberated its management team from the tedious, manual work necessary to provide daily sales and labor reports. Before the use of RPA, this process needed a team of eight regional managers to pull daily sales data for five different locations, each of which took at least 45 minutes to complete. By 10 AM every day, including weekends and holidays, 40 reports had to be produced.

“You only have so much time every day before you start running the restaurant,” says Caitlin Stritmatter, director of financial planning and analysis, at Primanti Brothers. “You can get so bogged down in the process of copying, pasting, filling out, and double-checking a spreadsheet, when you should be focused on looking at the numbers and what they’re saying. So, we wanted to take the busy work out of the process to free up time for thought and planning.”

“One of our regional managers said what a relief it is to not only have these reports already done but to know they’re accurate,” continues Stritmatter. “As a data person, that puts me at ease. It’s error-free and I know they’re looking at the right stuff.”

Real ROI: Since introducing RPA, the task is now completed by an RPA bot in three minutes instead of eight managers working for 45 minutes each day, saving Primanti Brothers USD 84,000 and attaining a 100% ROI in three months. Instead of working at their desks, Primanti’s regional managers can now spend more time providing the best (and most enjoyable) customer experience.

2. Automate all but the most interesting tasks

“We have a lot of smart people challenging assumptions,” says Casey Adams, senior director of IT and data strategy, at Credigy. “Nobody is afraid to ask how we can improve.”

A global B2B specialty finance company, Credigy. The culture of creativity developed at its business headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, has been useful to its development and ongoing success. To help its partners in navigating difficult markets and accelerating growth, analysts, statisticians, and other financial professionals are encouraged to investigate opportunities and develop creative solutions.

Credigy handles thousands of data files per year that are provided via email or an SFTP site. One of the first areas of concentration was managing how data and files are transported, a difficult, time-consuming task due to the high volume of data being received for analysis and review.

Real ROI: RPA bots allowed for the timely examination of 100% of the loan-related financial documents for some portfolio purchases to speed up information collection and related decision-making. Credigy deployed about 25 RPA bots to automate repetitive operations in the first year, which helped it be able to develop its business at a compound annual growth rate of 15%.

Within the next two years, Credigy plans to deploy hundreds of RPA bots. “As the team gets more experienced and we have an automation-first mindset with everybody, the opportunities will continue to grow and blossom,” says Adams. “We will build RPA automation that will be connected end-to-end and grow to 100% process automation.”

3. Allow employees to build their own useful bots

“RPA allows gains in efficiency at a very large scale,” says Sandro Ribeiro, CIO, of Lojacorr Network. “With faster access to information and greater data reliability and operational efficiency, automation is a strong ally for companies.”

The largest independent insurance brokerage network in Brazil, Lojacorr, gave its employees control over automation by allowing them to design their bots to replace time-consuming manual tasks that had to be resolved by outside parties.

“We’re able to think of new ways to work,” says Ribeiro. “And we can reinvent old processes that, because of the traditional models, used to limit our creativity when we thought of using only human operations.”

Real ROI: Since using RPA, Ribeiro’s team has seen an 80% increase in process execution speed without the need to add staff to support the operations.

“With RPA, internal teams and clients noticed the speed and agility in the availability of information and scale of growth. They started to understand the role of automation,” says Ribeiro. “They also learned new skills and saw new opportunities that come along with automation.”

Give your employees additional time to think through and prepare in the process of automation

Robotic process automation has become a focus for business and IT leaders looking to improve worker productivity and, ultimately, company performance. Many automation opportunities exist, and they have great potential. Although it’s simple to get started, it’s best to fully understand your process and task flows before automating. Employees can only utilize the abilities for which you hired them to outperform the competition by automating the appropriate work.

Here at CourseMonster, we know how hard it may be to find the right time and funds for training. We provide effective training programs that enable you to select the training option that best meets the demands of your company.

For more information, please get in touch with one of our course advisers today or contact us at training@coursemonster.com