Re-imagining Business Processes - a step towards digital transformation

The volatile-uncertain-complex-ambiguous business operating environment is forcefully placing firms on a journey to explore and embrace efficient ways of operating. The pressure is across all industries, be it finance, hospitality, manufacturing or healthcare as non is spared by the volatility of the macro and microeconomics dynamics. Organisations that are working towards Digital transformation must be ready and willing to challenge status quo and commit to undertake a complete turnaround journey. This involves a rethink and a redesign of the way they conduct their operations with aim of improving efficiency and agility that is required for a competitive edge leading to better performance.

Focusing on improved value delivery to stakeholders through increased competitiveness, the process often involves innovative thinking geared towards adoption of technology in form of digitization and digitalization.

One of the foundation steps in this digital transformation journey is adoption of robotic processes automation (RPA). This does not only pave way for advanced automation but for fervent use of AI technologies for competitive advantage.

RPA can be applied in automating repetitive tasks which use structured data, given its ability to execute tasks faster and with higher accuracy as compared to humans. However, RPA lacks cognitive capability and therefore heavily relies on predefined rules and instructions with simple and basic decision making.  

Various advantages of RPA to the business are: It takes away laborious tasks from employees hence they can be engaged in other tasks that require critical thinking and creativity and therefore improved productivity; automation of tasks of repetitive compliance tasks (reporting or data validation) reduces the risk of non-compliance; ability to scale automation of processes through additional of bots, if need be, which is more cost effective than hiring more humans; reduced cost of operations through minimization of errors and avoidance of manual tasks; Improved data quality as it increases accuracy and reduces the error rates.

Organizations that adopt RPA have an edge and competitive advantage over their peers in the same market. They can realize return on investment (ROI) through improved accuracy, efficiency, and cost savings. They are also setting the right foundation for digital transformation aligned to applications of AI, ML, and other automations.

While RPA comes with several benefits, it requires organisations to have proper governance mechanism in place to manage it properly and avoid misuse. It also comes with the never-confirmed idea of replacing the humans in the job place.