Given the right tools, automating operations–from IT to business processes–can be surprisingly easy and can reap major benefits. Understanding these benefits, and some obstacles, will help you develop support for an automation project that will see immediate ROI.
5 Major Benefits of Automation
The biggest benefits of RPA (robotic process automation) are reducing operating costs, higher productivity, availability, reliability, and optimized performance. In this guide, we'll walk through each of these benefits of RPA to show you how to implement a solution that can streamline operations for any department, from IT to HR, and in any industry, from healthcare to finance.
1. Cost Reduction
Every business faces global pressure to increase their profitability. Today’s IT teams are throwing everything they have at the problem–and it’s still not enough. In a recent survey, 42% of executives reported that budget constraints were their roadblock to innovation. One approach is to reduce costs. But, the key is to find a way to reduce costs without also reducing the capabilities of your workforce in a way that negatively impacts the entire company. All without adding headcount.
RPA software is a better and more intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction. The greatest opportunity is to increase service to the customer (end user) while systematically reducing costs, ensuring more time can be spent on strategic tasks that add to the bottom line. RPA bots working alongside your human workforce is an easy, cost-effective way to enable rapid growth without incurring further costs.
Eliminate the need to pay for redundant and unnecessary work. These tasks are still getting done, but with fewer hours spent per project, those resources can be allocated somewhere else. For example, automation software can dynamically provision/deprovision virtual machines, saving admins time. Nightly batch or balancing processes can also be automated, so companies don’t need to hire someone to monitor and manage overnight or on-call workers to do the job.
Another way RPA helps reduce costs is by increasing the ROI of existing tools through automated integration. Using RPA provides a central automation platform to connect systems, applications, and workflows without needing additional expensive hardware tools.
2. Increased Productivity
As an organization’s technology demands grow, productivity becomes a bigger concern. We are still on the quest to close the perennial cybersecurity workforce skills gap. One industry survey revealed that 74% stated their inability to manage their cybersecurity posture was being negatively affected by a lack of security resources. This, in turn, impacts business. Automating operations can replace the need to onboard, train, and insure people who simply aren’t available to hire, or bridge the gap between services your team needs and skills they currently don’t possess.
RPA solutions enable your workforce to spend less time on repetitive, tedious work and more time on strategic tasks. By automating tasks, teams can feel a little less stretched and a little more productive. Here are just three of the top processes to automate:
File Transfer and Secure FTP | Baptist Health South Florida streamlined claims processing file transfers of the daily individual 837 claims files (both inpatient and outpatient) to an FTP server. When the files are detected on the FTP server, an RPA task is initiated that joins all the inpatient files together and all the outpatient files together. Once this is completed, the two files are transferred securely to an application via FTP.
Data & Nightly Backups | Celina Insurance Group used RPA to streamline nightly balancing operations, including file transfer, automated backup, and auditing thousands of daily changes. This removed the need to cross-train a second shift system administrator, a role that required a lot of training and experienced high turnover. Using RPA, they were able to have a bot remote into the system’s hardware management console server and initiate commands, essentially automating the entire month-end processing procedure.
Onboarding and Offboarding | Avoid the burnout by automating the tedium that is onboarding. RPA can automate user provisioning for tools like Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, saving your team hours in paperwork and never requiring them to code. When a new employee is added to your roster, RPA can help you remove or add access to applications, audit permissions, and edit distribution lists. It also handles change requests like contact information changes, password resets, information updates, and payroll changes.
3. High Availability
It's not news that practically every piece of day-to-day business relies on online systems: order entry, reservations, assembly instructions, shipping orders—the list goes on. If these systems aren't available, the business suffers. And with the high volume of cloud computing, the outage of key systems can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and even tarnish a company’s reputation.
High availability is clearly one of IT management’s primary goals. Here too, automated operations can help. A disk drive may crash, but the situation becomes serious when there is not an adequate backup. A key advantage to automation is the ability to automate your save and recovery systems to ensure protection from the potential disaster of disk loss, or inadvertent damage to system objects from human error.
In a networked environment, centralized management also makes sense. Remote resources can solve business issues while a single operator at a central console observes critical functions throughout the network. Continuous monitoring with a low CPU and communications overhead makes it easier to spot vital network performance trends.
4. Increased Reliability
Productivity is an obvious benefit of automation. However, reliability is the real gem that sparkles with automation. It is the cornerstone of any good automation strategy and without it you have confusion, chaos, and unhappy users. All these types of errors occur in single-location organizations. Now, imagine a network of multiple systems, geographically dispersed that include multiple operating systems, communications issues, integrated local area network processing, and attached PCs. The chance for errors rises exponentially. The only way to make this type of environment work is automated operations.
Software can handle complex tasks dynamically and intelligently, based on predefined parameters. Yet, critical company functions such as releasing jobs, performing backups, and ensuring communications, are normally performed by entry-level individuals within the IT organization. The benefit of an automated system is that these functions are reliably executed by the automation software, relieving operations personnel from hours of tedious, boring and manual tasks.
Automating your IT workload means automating batch transfers, simultaneous workloads, and save and recovery systems. Continuous monitoring lets you spot performance trends before they become a problem. If you are taking the time to deploy and utilize these IT processes, automation helps you do so with peace of mind by helping them run predictably and dependably.
5. Optimized Performance
Every company would like to have their enterprise perform like a thoroughbred. In reality, it is more likely to be overburdened with work. Even though advancements in computers make them faster and less expensive every year, the demands on them always catch up and eventually exceed the level of capability that a company’s computer infrastructure possesses. That leaves a lot of companies wanting to improve their system performance.
Plus, environments are becoming hyper complex: hybrid work, cloud-based workloads, containerization, lengthy supply chains, and lingering on-premises environments all present a layer of complexity not present in the networks of even ten years ago. These new challenges require new solutions.
Two options to improve performance are to either:
1. Upgrade hardware
2. Purchase a newer system
Both are expensive choices. While it's also possible to tune a system for better performance, it takes a highly skilled person who is not normally available 24 hours a day. And, once a system is tuned for a specific workload, if the workload changes, the settings are no longer optimum.
Automating operations can take the place of these expensive alternatives.
Automation Challenges
The benefits of automated systems can be a powerful motive. Even more so when you understand the high return on investment. As you look to implementing an RPA solution, it's important to beware of any pitfalls and obstacles you might encounter. But with the right solution, these are easily avoided.
People always find excuses not to do something. A recent survey of IT operators asked why they hadn’t automated their systems. Answers ranged from the expected to the uninformed. The common answers were no money, no time, no coding expertise, or no staff. Some sample responses:
- No money
- No time
- No coding expertise
- No staff
Some sample responses from the survey included:
“We do not have the budget and are not familiar with the automation options available in the market.”
“Too little time and numerous issues that we would need to address.”
“Not necessary—I am in the process of writing my own code.”
Of the companies surveyed, 43% have identified and placed operations automation projects on their calendar. That means that 57% of these companies have not recognized the potential advantages of automation.
Obstacles to Automation
Two of the most common benefits of automation, availability and reliability, are convincing factors to pursue automation projects, and typically supersede obstacles. Still, obstacles to operations automation, generally speaking, fall into two categories: cost and people.
Cost
Availability and reliability are strong arguments in favor of automation and normally supersede the need to cost-justify them. However, as projects advance, additional cost factors come into play. The companies that implement automated systems early often see positive bottom line results from their efforts. However, cost savings are not the primary reason to automate IT and business operations. The focus should be on improving service to the end users. As the quality of this service improves with automation software, the costs associated with it also improve.
One method that initially seems cost-effective is developing in-house solutions. These in-house automation solutions are often successful at first, but the scope is usually too narrow. Systems often fail because of the maintenance and enhancements required to maintain and expand the automation process. And, in-house automation solutions are expensive and typically are low priority in the IT department. This is why most internally developed automation efforts stall after achieving limited success. Many companies that have gone down this path eventually turn to off-the-shelf automation software.
People
It's important to remember that automation is meant to enhance your human workforce—not replace it. Not having a strategy for handling staff concerns and managing staff participation is one of the easiest ways to fail at implementing automation. No company wants to have a reputation for firing employees, or to have an environment of low morale and trepidation.
Another human obstacle is expertise. Often the people that know the processes best have limited to no coding skills. And the experts on the IT team are already tapped for time and are hesitant to take on new projects. But with a low or no-code automation solution, RPA becomes easy to use and fast to implement for everyone—no matter their coding experience.
Summary of the Top 5 Benefits of RPA
From management’s perspective, reliability, availability, productivity, performance, and cost reduction are powerful arguments for adopting an operations automation solution. However, achieving these benefits requires discipline to overcome the obstacles. As long as you understand, anticipate, and balance these obstacles against the potential benefits of automation, they should not interrupt your plans.
Automate stands out for its scalable, user-friendly RPA for IT and business users that features low-code development. It seamlessly integrates with other applications via UI, API, or native actions and can be leveraged as a handy DIY job builder for rule-based, repetitive tasks.
Start Seeing the Benefits of Automation with RPA
Whether you need a solution for one department, a small business, or an entire enterprise, Automate is a top-rated RPA solution that empowers users of all skill levels to build strong, durable automation.
