The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here, with advancements in cyber technology generating more data than the world has ever known. Data is one of the most valuable assets in the modern economy. It offers insights to create new business models, improve social and financial dynamics, and resolve public issues. Ultimately, the success of businesses and technological innovations today depends on data availability, accuracy, and access.
Understanding Data-Digestion is key to its insight availability.
As the volume of data continues to grow, so does the pressure for businesses and governments to process and use it effectively. And data is only effective if companies and entities understand how to convert it into digestible information from which they can glean meaningful and actionable insights.
Historically, processes for digesting data – data entry, mining, and analysis – have sat with employees. But as data volume explodes, this is no longer a feasible solution. These processes, if done manually, can lead to employee burnout and low productivity rates.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solves for these challenges. RPA saves employees time and stress dealing with mundane tasks, allowing them to dedicate their efforts towards more creative work. The technology gathers, organizes, and produces insights from data faster than humans are often capable of. This split effort between humans and RPA bots leads to increased job satisfaction and productivity, improved compliance, and enhanced customer service. As a result, organizations see greater business outputs that can propel them beyond their competition.
Here’s what you need to know about RPA and how it’s changing business as we know it for the better:
RPA accelerates existing office processes and workflows.
RPA can be used to automate menial tasks – such as data collection and monitoring – that waste valuable employee time. The technology can then execute processes in a speedier, more accurate, and cost-effective manner. With workplace operations optimized, employees can redirect their energies to more critical tasks.
What automated process do you need for your business?
Naturally, different businesses will need different processes automated, so RPA deployments can be customized to account for this. RPA can serve a range of organizations, from large enterprises to small- to mid-sized businesses across industries.
Therefore, companies can automate a combination of processes that will make their unique business models most productive. Working with expert providers, organizations can design their RPA deployments to improve their specific operational needs. Further, organizations can continue adapting their RPA deployments over time as those needs evolve.
Nielsen Global Market Research
In the case of Nielsen, a global market research firm, maximizing workplace productivity has been critical for the business’ success. Nielsen aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of data to help organizations make better business decisions and wiser investments.
With more than 50,000 employees in over 100 countries, the company needed a dynamic, large-scale solution that would allow its business to compute and glean insights from the data while freeing up its people to focus on engaging customers in the most strategic, valuable ways possible.
Reducing the number of manual tasks in the marketplace.
To achieve these objectives, Nielsen’s RPA-adoption strategy was built around reducing the manual tasks involved in making measurement data, insights, and analytics available to the marketplace. Additionally, the company reallocated human time and attention toward adding value for customers and evolving the business.
With UiPath as its RPA vendor of choice, Nielsen was able to leverage its masses of data and expedite the time it takes to deliver analyses to customers. Nielsen’s specialized RPA deployment has led to automation across 20+ organizational units in 40+ countries, saving the company an estimated 347,997 hours in the past 18 months alone.
Nielsen exemplifies how businesses that take the time to tailor RPA programs to their unique needs see a massive return. The company’s employees are now positioned to perform better, more critical tasks, which contributes to higher overall business output.
RPA aggregates data across systems to unleash never-before-imagined insights.
RPA can also help companies attempting to integrate digital innovations cohesively. The technology connects siloed systems by enlisting bots to pull data from various systems and present more comprehensive insights into overarching business trends. These trends not only eliminates employee time wasted searching across locations but also more quickly identifies insights that can steer business performance.
For example, a human resources provider was looking to streamline the 2,500 work sick certificates they received per month. The department took four minutes to process each certificate using two applications on desktop, SAP, and paper. Using UiPath’s automation, employees were able to eliminate the manual process with a zero percent error rate.
RPA creates a foundation from which people can focus on game-changing work.
In contrast to concerns that automation kills jobs, RPA enables employees to reach their full potential. RPA allows employees to focus more on the strategic, innovative thinking needed to meet the demands of quickly evolving markets. Additionally, RPA decreases employee stress, which allows them to function more efficiently.
Companies wary of RPA’s impact should view it as an enhancement to existing jobs rather than a replacement of them.
Such enhancements are what propel business productivity and, in the case of some companies and government agencies, intensifies the societal impact.
Take the New York Foundling for example. As one of the city’s oldest and largest social services providers, the New York Foundling leveraged RPA to mitigate time spent on tedious tasks. In turn, this improved employee happiness, positioning, fo them to better assist and support their clients in need.
Before RPA, workers completed hours of manual data entry work per day, which led to a staggering employee churn of 40%. The nonprofit saved 100,000 hours in manual work by automating these processes, which greatly reduced staff turnover rates.
Clinicians can focus on personal job roles to increase societal impact with the time saved.
RPA is helping organizations make sense of all the data the Fourth Industrial Revolution is ushering in. This allows businesses to be more productive, seize the benefits of the digital economy, and more quickly address the world’s most critical issues with smart business models.
With menial processes automated, employees can spend more time analyzing information that generates knowledge and valuable insights. As a whole, this allows employees to propel their businesses – and industries – forward as a result.
Image Credit: ThisIsEngineering; Pexels
