RPA – Here’s Why It’s A Necessity For Your Back-office

The old ways of managing and supporting business processes are undergoing a paradigm shift. Disruptive technologies – like intelligent automation (RPA+AI) – are helping chief experience officers (CXOs) re-invent their business operations by bringing in optimizations.

The back office provides vital support and administration to the business and can help create service differentiation with business functions such as IT, HR, and finance. Digital-savvy CFOs and CIOs across the globe realize that efforts to transform customer-facing systems and processes are limited without equally effective and integrated back-office operations. According to EY estimates, automation of back-office work could provide companies with savings of about 20% to 60% of baseline full-time employee (FTE) costs

A survey found that 60% of customer dissatisfaction sources originated in the back office. It is also estimated that 10-20% of all transaction volumes in a contact center are the result of execution issues in the back office.

Efforts to digitize core business processes are not new. Over the last two decades, companies have invested in enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, large-scale custom systems, and business process outsourcing to transform their core operations. Some have tangible benefits, but most created unintended side effects such as subpar user experiences, disparate applications and IT systems, and more.

As organizations are gearing up to be future-ready, technologies such as RPA and AI are becoming increasingly the tools that boost transformation efforts. They can have a significant impact on back-office functions to bring about operational efficiencies: reduced cost, faster turnaround times, and increased productivity.

Augmenting RPA with AI technologies expands the possibilities of back-office automation to include nearly any scenario, including a Digital Workforce that can reason and make decisions and learn on the job to become valuable resources in your human workforce.

To kickstart your organization’s digital transformation efforts, here are 5 use-cases ripe for atuomation:

DATA SCRAPING AND DATA ENTRY

Someone in your team looks up data in one place (such as a website, software or a document) and enters it into another place. With today’s OCR (optical character recognition), the data source could even be scanned documents. Processes like this are great candidates for automation. 

Here are some examples:

•          Entering information about a new employee into your human resources systems
•          Entering information into your accounting system, e.g., invoice processing
•          Entering customer data into your CRM system
•          Inputting time worked from your time-tracking software into your payroll software to take work off your HR department.

 

AUTOMATED REPORT GENERATION

Someone in your team collects data to compile a report. The structure of the report is stable over time, and the sources remain the same? Software robots could do this data extraction and compilation.

Here are some examples:

•      Compiling a report about your marketing efforts out of data from Facebook, Google Analytics and Email-Software
•         Setting up a business intelligence dashboard that collects financial performance data from different tools (accounting, controlling, bank-account
•        Gathering insights about your manufacturing processes, which consists of data from your ERP system, your production system and your inventory software.

 

DOCUMENT PROCESSING OR SUBMISSION

Do you and your team save, move or upload documents repeatedly? If so, this could be a great candidate for automation. 

Here are some inspirations:

•              Uploading invoices into your accounting system to increase the efficiency of bookkeeping
•              Saving incoming documents in drive folders for documentation purposes
•              Saving freight documents with your order information (logistics & supply chain management)

 

SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION

Not all social media platforms offer possibilities to schedule posts or activities. RPA can help here. 

Here’s what it can do:

•         Publish pre-written posts at a defined date and time
•        Like or reply to comments on posts
•        Send our pre-written private messages to contacts in your contact list

 

RECONCILIATION PROCESS

There’s an endless list of processes that require comparing two datasets about the same subject but from different sources. RPA can help with reconciliation.

Examples include:

•          Travel expenses processing to take work off your hr employees’ plate
•          Comparing transaction and receipt data for your accounting with high accuracy
•          Claims processing in healthcare or insurance companies
•          Processing warranty or return/refund claims in customer service/retail industry

Credit: Automation Anywhere