When we think of RPA, we get inclined towards the strategy where robots are replacing humans for doing certain tasks. But since post pandemic the employment gap around the world has increased and companies are short of funds, adopting a technology and making inroads to digital transformation seems like a far fetched dream now.

That being said, on the contrary, Gartner predicts that 90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022 as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labor and manual effort.

Gardner also anticipated that RPA demand to grow and service providers to more consistently push RPA solutions to their clients because of the impact of COVID-19,” said Cathy Tornbohm, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “The decreased dependency on a human workforce for routine, digital processes will be more attractive to end users not only for cost reduction benefits, but also for insuring their business against future impacts like this pandemic.”

But given the current state, the question companies are seeking to answer is whether to freeze any financial commitments or reallocate the resources towards automation. Let’s evaluate.

Staying comfortable with Status Quo is no more a choice

RPA helps businesses be more operationally efficient during times of crisis as it frees the employees from low value, time consuming tasks so that they can pursue more strategic roles necessary for innovation and sustainability.

Automation also facilitates business continuity by focusing on two major pillars of any organisation – People and Processes. It helps in providing great employee experience by liberating employees from mundane, unproductive and repetitive tasks by automating these processes thus saving time and cost.

Let’s look at how the Industries are leveraging Automation and turning crisis into opportunities.

How Diagnostic Labs are using Automation

According to government regulations, it was mandatory for all labs conducting Covid-19 tests to report the results on the ICMR portal; even before releasing reports to their customers. Automating the process has enabled Diagnostic labs to process nearly 60000+ entries in a month and make huge savings, employees are now able to engage in more critical activities, resulting in higher productivity.

How Hospitals are Using Automation

RPA Bots are used in hospitals to fix patient appointments. The bots track the doctor’s schedule and notify patients in case of unavailability for the patient’s appointment. It also sends automated reminders about the discharge guidelines such as follow-ups scheduled or due medical tests to the patients. This is helping hospitals to address the patient’s needs better with an instant, automated response and provide them better healthcare services.

Apart from the healthcare industry, here’s how business functions benefited from the use of Automation.

Implementation of Automation In Finance Department

Organizations with large reach, Bank reconciliation was a very time consuming yet important task that the employees had been doing at regular intervals. Usually the finance department manually matches the transaction details in their systems to the Bank statements received on email. Further they used to share mismatched details with the accounts team, and upload the matching data in ERP. However, the task took a lot of time, had high chances of error and reduced employee efficiency. After automation, the RPA Bots download statements from the bank portal/emails, reconcile them and enter data in ERP automatically.

Implementation of Automation In HR Department

Post pandemic, the HR personnel are under tremendous strain dealing with new work-from-home challenges and helping their companies maintain business continuity amid disruption.  At the same time, organizations still need to hire and retain top talent, which means ensuring that new employees become engaged and productive as soon as possible. Automation of HR hiring, labour compliances and onboarding processes results in a better new hire experience and frees up HR staff for higher value activities.

Implementation of Automation in IT Department

If one thing, the pandemic has taught the companies is to be IT savvy and automation gives wings to remote working and IT compliances. There are multiple IT department challenges which automation can solve with ease. Operations and maintenance, end user support, asset tracking and management, data migration and tracking, cybersecurity, compliance and reporting etc. The list is endless, we can possibly automate any repetitive tasks in front or back office without any human intervention.

While the above are just a few examples of how automation can steer companies towards growth and sustainability, the possibilities are endless and in any department possible. If you wish to evaluate Automation for your organisation, you can reach out to us at sanam.mishra@teamcomputers.com.