In today’s competitive business market across Northamptonshire, AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged to streamline operations, enhancing efficiency, and drive productivity. Competitors are embracing AI & RPA and reaping the benefits.

Each business in the county will have different requirements but the broad themes can be addressed by the technology.

1. Efficiency Enhancement

RPA revolutionizes mundane tasks by automating repetitive processes, freeing up valuable time for team members to focus on higher-value activities. By eliminating manual activity, RPA ensures accuracy and accelerates task completion.

The boost to business process execution for office staff in Northamptonshire can have a ripple effect to other parts of the business.

Investments in automation to increase business productivity is a clear demonstration in the value of Staff, showing that their knowledge and skills are too valuable to waste undertaking “Boring Work”.

AI enables a wider range of tasks to be effectively processed so that the execution capabilities of RPA can be gained in more business scenarios.

2. Cost Reduction

RPA enables significant cost savings by minimizing human errors, reducing manual effort, and provides the potential for optimizing resource allocation.

By reducing the unit cost to execute business processes there is the potential for savings or re-allocation of budgets.

Of course, with any automation the biggest savings are made when the automation capacity is close to full utilisation. The larger the volume of processing performed by the automation, the bigger the savings for the business.

Long term trends for software processing to delivery automation is delivering consistently lower prices whereas the trend for human labour is generally increasing. This applies as much in Northamptonshire as it does across the rest of England.

3. Improved Accuracy and Compliance

Human errors can be costly and detrimental to business operations. RPA ensures consistent accuracy in executing tasks, minimizing the risk of errors and enhancing compliance with regulations.

Repeated execution of business processes on by staff on computer systems is often seen as boring work. The more mundane the task, the harder it is for people to give full attention 100% of the time and therefore errors creep in.

Some errors will be caught during the execution of the business process allowing immediate correction by the operator. This has a relatively small impact in terms of the time to correct the mistake.

The more damaging errors are where the wrong values are used but they are actually valid in some situations or where parts of the business process are not fully completed (e.g. Tick Box confirming that a credit check has been done).

RPA is good at the boring work.

The mental health of staff can benefit when they are not required to perform large volumes of repetitive tasks. National studies have shown that even diligent individuals will make errors in tasks about 4% of the time when processing significant volumes of similar work.

4. Scalability and Flexibility

Scalability is essential for businesses aiming for long-term growth. RPA systems are highly scalable, capable of handling increased workload demands without compromising performance.

RPA offers flexibility, allowing both growth and where necessary a reduction in activity. Switching off automation capacity does not involve complex HR processes of “Reduction in hours” or “Redundancy”.

Once RPA processing capacity is in place, it can be used by any automation. If the balance of the automation workload changes or priorities need to be changed, it is normally a small configuration change to implement. This makes the solution flexible.

There are peaks in troughs in most business workloads. With automation in place, there is no need to ask staff to work overtime, no need for additional temporary staff and no backlog of work building up. The capacity provided by the automation provides the buffer for day to day changes that occur in Northamptonshire.

5. Enhanced Scheduling Options

Once a task in a business process is automated, it no longer requires a person to be available for the task to be completed. This opens the possibility to re-schedule the work.

Consideration needs to be given on when the task can start and when it needs to be completed. Would changing the scheduling have any knock-on impacts?

Automation processing capacity is usually available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In many businesses, automating the tasks that people complete during the working day can provide an opportunity for the work to be undertaken overnight. Such changes can reduce business process cycle times with corresponding benefits to overall operations.

It allows work to be competed overnight, so when staff arrive in the morning, they can resolve any errors and progress other work.

As the growth in customer expectations for business to operate 24 x 7, the more tasks that can be completed without delays caused by staff availability, the better.

 

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For more information contact Ether Solutions

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