According to the annual work index, employees spend 58% of their day doing "work about work," such as conversing about work, looking for information, switching between different apps, and so forth.
This costs the service sector annually more than $5 trillion (yes, with a "T") in 11 different countries. Because of this, companies from various industries and verticals think it's a good idea to relieve your employees of a load of menial tasks and rule-based duties.
The advantages of incorporating RPA are, after all, incredible—look at what a recent Deloitte research has shown!
After all, implementing RPA offers incredible advantages;
These staggering figures undoubtedly contribute to RPA's promotion as the forthcoming BIG thing in business. But not everything that glitters is gold.
Do the benefits of RPA outweigh the whole project ownership costs?
Simply put, "from a cost-effectiveness perspective, the benefits of robotic process automation are rapidly outweighing the drawbacks."
We'll see.
The Primary Advantages RPA Provides to Businesses
There is no denying the extensive and far-reaching benefits of RPA.
Through process speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency, RPA has the ability to greatly enhance business operations by enabling you to concentrate on customer satisfaction and staff engagement.
The following is a partial list of RPA advantages:
Productivity
Bots can finish the same work around five times faster than humans can. They also work nonstop. This suggests that work will be completed more quickly, allowing for the completion of additional tasks.
RPA assists in automating the bulk of activities and reducing human effort in the following ways when considering business-specific processes:
- Transferring data between sources
- Displaying apps and updating databases
- Data extraction from files
- Using email and instant chat to manage communications
- Using machine aid, standardizing procedures, and making decisions
- Tracking software
In general, increased productivity reduces costs and creates room for expansion.
Accuracy
Human error frequently leads to bad judgment and costly operational mishaps. According to studies, humans account for a whopping 80% of maintenance mistakes.
Here, RPA introduces a high level of business accuracy that gets rid of human mistakes. This dependable technique is reliable and raises the caliber of the product. Some of the errors it corrects include:
- Inaccurate or incomplete consumer information
- Insecure data
- Personalized data and incorrect analytics
Although any data inaccuracies could impair your customers' experience, RPA reduces the likelihood to a minimum. Additionally, it streamlines operations and completes routine activities fast without sacrificing the caliber of the job produced.
Utilization of Resources
Operational efficiency is one of the main issues facing enterprises.
This is the failure to recognize the underperforming assets and the bottlenecks that staff members run with when completing their regular tasks. According to a research, 92% of employees are more productive when using technology to help them with their everyday tasks. In plainer terms, RPA improves decision-making and motivates the staff to minimize costly operational errors.
Your employees can concentrate on activities that are important since RPA takes over boring tasks and makes them error-free. Additionally, it is adaptable enough to carry out a magnificent range of jobs, reducing the amount of resources directed at them.
Customer Satisfaction
More than 90% of happy consumers are likely to make additional purchases, according to a HubSpot survey, particularly when the business offers top-notch customer service.
Therefore, by relieving your customer care staff of the responsibility for tabulations and forms, you are allowing them plenty of room to provide personalized customer support. Frequently, the outcome is a better customer experience with a great chance to meet service-level agreement standards.
Great Return on Investment (ROI)
Your ROI may be constrained by high operational expenditures. However, incorporating RPA into your regular business operations can save your operational costs by up to 50%, indicating that operating costs typically decline quickly.
Additionally, bots operate nonstop for 24 hours, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, resulting in a continuous workflow! Therefore, implementing RPA technology ensures that your operations run continually and helps you save money that would have otherwise been spent on hiring more staff.
RPA will allow you to start experiencing ROI in just a few short weeks, unlike certain IT investments that may need you to wait months or even years.
Changing the labor equation
RPA, without a doubt, modifies your labor equations, but it doesn't necessarily imply that you'll be reducing full-time equivalents (FTE). Your human employees will be liberated from boring routines and uninteresting jobs for which they are overqualified as a result.
Consequently, they finally have the capacity to manage higher-value jobs.
Chaos in staffing is minimized
Staffing is not an easy task, particularly for some teams in your company where demand is uneven, activity levels are unpredictable, and turnover is significant. However, unlike human workers, bots can scale up and down quickly.
Additionally, they are much faster and more economical to deploy. It's safe to state that RPA makes it much simpler to have the appropriate workforce level at the appropriate moment.
An Detailed Analysis of the Cost of Automation
What are the key causes of the ostensibly high robotic process automation cost, you must be wondering? Or, what should your company do to fully utilize RPA's potential without going bankrupt?
Let's find out!
Top Five Factors Driving RPA Cost
- RPA vendor costs
- Number and Complexity of RPA Bots
- Process Analysis, RPA Consulting, and Engineering Costs
- Cost of RPA Integrations
- Maintenance, support, and RPA scaling costs
Here is a detailed breakdown of these elements. Let's look at it.
1. RPA Vendor Pricing
Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant Report for Robotic Process Automation and Forrester Wave: Robotic Process Automation, Q1 2021 survey, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft Power Automation are the driving force of the global RPA market, predicted to reach $45 billion by 2030.
2. Number and Complexity of RPA Bots
Robotics Process Automation tools are different.
For example, there are two types of bots – attended and unattended RPA bots. The core difference between these two types of intelligent software bots lies in their ability to perform tasks independently.
Also, not to forget it’s quintessential to mark the difference between business process automation and robotic process automation tools.
Business Process Automation (BPA) follows the if-then pattern to automate workflows, whereas RPA watches your employees interact with software system interfaces and mimic their actions. Therefore, it’s right to say BPA and RPA have a brighter, more technologically upgraded relative, coined as Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).
3. Process Analysis, RPA Consulting, and Engineering Costs
Despite technological advancements, RPA tools don’t require brand-new platforms and significant infrastructure upgrades.
However, RPA requires a good upfront design and deep expertise in the processes subjected to automation. Otherwise, your RPA deployment will have configuration errors, which could end bots sourcing information from IT systems and performing tasks efficiently.
4. Cost of RPA Integrations
RPA tools must be connected to the systems over APIs to access IT systems and their interfaces. And, it’s not a surprise, the cost of all the APIs, applications, and services that contribute to the complete robotic process automation costs – not all those APIs are provided or supported by your RPA service provider by default.
So, connecting your bot to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud services, for instance, would add additional robotic process automation costs that increase proportionally with the amount of data and server calls managed by the bot.
In totality, add-on tools account for approximately 5% of the entire RPA costs.
5. Maintenance, support, and RPA scaling costs
Since RPA bots reside in and engage with current software applications, significant changes made to these systems or the data they produce may trigger RPA reconfigurations and frequent updates too.
Simultaneously, many companies overlook RPA scaling costs or fall victim to scope creep, expanding automation efforts to as many processes and business verticals as possible or trying hands-on the idea of adding AI capabilities to existing RPA systems.
One way to avoid these challenges is to build a high-level RPA implementation strategy at the initial stage. So, this approach, among other things, accommodates software dependencies, proactive change management, and stakeholder alignment.
Ultimately, the key to evaluating RPA success is understanding that RPA is not a silver bullet. Rather, RPA is a cog in the wheel of your business, and when appropriately oiled, it can turn far more efficiently.
Lastly, what is the actual cost of robotic process automation (RPA)?
Let's look it up!
Making a business plan for robotic process automation sounds simple since companies are quick to realize the benefits of automating routine, labor-intensive, repetitive processes that were previously performed by people.
RPA is revolutionizing process efficiencies and maximizing productivity across companies, and it’s rewriting the way conventional business models work. Even in some scenarios, analysts recommend that RPA create a second parallel economy that bridges to the physical economy in concurrent systems to speed up and optimize knowledge work.
Justifying the costs of automation may seem daunting, but investing in the technology and its long-term outcomes have been effective across industries in building an enterprise’s competitive advantage while keeping the business prepared for market changes.
Positioning your business to outperform competitors is invaluable; the time to automate is now read more about RPA Benefits vs Cost of Integration here in detail. It’s high time to bring your business on board and be a part of the most significant change ever!
