The Role of Finance in the Middle Market
Digital Transformation – Robotic Process Automation
Have you ever run into a business challenge that has no clear out-of-the-box process or technology solution that can solve your pain point? Today, these business scenarios are very common for middle-market companies. For example, being able to track key information from your business contracts, such as when the project starts, when the project ends, etc. All of these data points are key to helping you forecast the demand of your business and resource planning to meet your obligations.
However, when it comes to reviewing hundreds of contracts and updating the status of existing contracts, this process can be very tedious, and unnecessarily complex for your current resources to maintain. In situations like these, creatively combining technology, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and reengineering processes, becomes extremely important for a middle market business to succeed - allowing you to focus on customers’ needs rather than trying to keep up with mundane back-office activities. See a bot in action below.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
RPA is a programmable software that can perform routine, repeatable tasks across your current IT applications. RPA has the capabilities to execute activities much faster than human beings do. RPA focuses on streamlining repetitive tasks that require little to no intellectual input and are mainly tedious for employees to carry out - allowing your resources to focus on obtaining key information and focusing on analysis and value add work.
There are two types of automations:
- Non-attended: Certain automations can work independently and with no human interaction (as seen above).
- Attended: Automations that will require minimal human input, allowing your employees to focus on reviewing information rather than preparing, searching and parsing data.
Unattended Automations (It does not need human intervention)
- Non-attended processes are carried out by robots who work continuously, which allows automation for 24/7/365. The advantages of unattended bots are manifold, and since they work even when your business is not, return on investment is immediate. For example, in the business contracts example listed above, this is considered a non-attended automation because it is providing key information to a user without additional inputs from the user to check on key information from the business contracts.
Attended Automations (It works hand in hand with humans)
- Attended robots work with your employees’ workstations, where they will be checking on completed activities that are very time consuming. For example, downloading multiple reports from different databases and then organizing the information in a certain fashion to review updated numbers. In this case, the bot will download the information and parse it for your employee, allowing your employee to just focus on the updated numbers. With attended robots, the process can be simplified and employees can turn their attention solely to the value-adding work.
Once you start to feel more comfortable with this technology, you will have a control room dashboard that will display different type of automations going from attended to unattended and their proper status. Regardless of the type of automations, you will have full visibility and control of what Robotic Process Automation is doing, and the value that this technology is bringing to your business.
Similar to the car manufacturing assembly process years ago within the automobile industry, to gain efficiencies, business processes are moving towards accelerating back-office activities, allowing your resources to focus on your customers and other externalities that can affect your business’ bottom line.
How to Get Started?
There are very low barriers of entry to start using RPA. Implementation takes a few weeks, focusing on key manual processes, and begins with a rapid automation assessment. The assessment begins with a discussion of which processes are good candidates for RPA, followed by breakout sessions with process owners to obtain an understanding of each process – creating a business case, demonstrating your return of investment, which leads to drastic time savings for your team and true cost savings in the back office. With those short-term checkpoints completed, we can bring quick value to your business and accelerate the information processing while allowing you to focus on your customers’ needs.
Using the concepts mentioned above, Citrin Cooperman’s Robotic Process Automation Service Offering brings you the latest sophisticated business processes, enabling you to lead your business organization and the overall growth of your business.
Contact us to find out how we can help on your RPA journey. Here are some additional resources that might interest you:
Please visit our Strategy & Business Transformation Practice website by clicking this link.