How RPA can help industries in the COVID crisis
There is no doubt that this crisis affects us all, and we have seen already that ⅓ of the companies they are closed and another ⅓ are directly affected by the crisis.
Many companies have shifted their work remotely, but for many smaller companies and organizations, working remotely is still a new thing. Remote working has its limitations, but we have seen applied in different sectors from education (high schools, universities) to lawyers. For tech companies, working remotely is not a new thing. Many companies already practice this worldwide, and most of the people are already ready to adapt to this change.
The crisis made a shift in the economy and many industries have been affected. Some of them recorded an increase in the number of sales and some have been already closed. Most of them have migrated to online and made available their products to a marketplace: from local producers to restaurants.
According to a study made recently, a comparison between March 2019 and March 2020 has shown that there has been an increase in medical equipment, food & related equipment and activities that are happening at home (gym equipment and monitors for working). The whole study is available here.
This crisis causes us to deal with unseen scenarios where people are overwhelmed by work. Parts of this work can be automated and handled by RPA robots, and here are a few examples:
Financial
Banks have been overwhelmed with requests from the clients that they want to postpone the loan. The personnel who are on the frontline, have many requests than usual and the response time increases drastically.
Because of the large volume of data, an RPA robot can reduce the work time and analyze some of the cases directly. This will increase the customer experience and reduce the workload for the employees.
Another use case for RPA is the process of loan analyzing. Some of the governments have established security procedures to sustain the businesses with loans that are guaranteed by the government. Because of the large amount of the impacted people, the number of requests is higher and the risk analysis takes longer than usual.
An RPA robot can take some of the tasks and simplify the procedure. Clients will have fast response times and they can take decisions faster.
Medical
The crisis impacted directly the medical system: more doctors needed to be upfront and the hospitals were full. To centralize the cases of the COVID infections, hospitals needed to fill in information that is centralized further. This operation happens daily so the nurses spend time centralizing papers.
An RPA robot can handle this paperwork by reading the scanned documents and send them to the central system, so doctors have more time to take care of patients.
Retail
The crisis affected the consumers and many of them get prepared with food that lasts longer. Retailers have created more orders than usual and suppliers are confronted with a higher volume of requests.
Higher throughput of data fits perfectly with RPA and is 4–10 times faster than manual work.
Recruiting
The shifting of the economy has caused some of the job positions to increase the requests made. In the case of product delivery, the increase in CVs has increased 8 times. On the other side, the demand for personnel that is delivering increased also and recruiting agencies confronted a bottleneck that they didn’t supply the demand.
An RPA robot can not do the entire recruiting, but it can offer valuable information that is decreasing the recruiting time.
Insurance
The insurance is generally prepared for event losses and ready to react, but because of the current situation, it becomes difficult. The insurers respond to all the payers’ claims: investment managers, persons and business entities. The claims analysis takes time and it overwhelms the employees.
To reduce the analysis time and time response, an RPA robot can take some of these tasks. Customers will receive a faster response and the robot can handle the scheduling of the cases.
HR
To stop the COVID spreading, governments limited the travel of the personnel and people have restrictions to go out. Not all of the companies can adapt to working from home, and some of them need to continue to work. One example is the transport & delivery companies.
The employees that are working for these companies, need to have a signed paper from the employer to show on an eventual police stop that they are at work so they don’t get a ticket. Because these papers are valid only one day, the HR department needs to issue these papers once a day.
This task can be taken by an RPA robot where based on an employee request (made on e-mail or WhatsApp), it can generate the paper, sign-it and keep track of the generated papers.
Public sector
The wide range of spearing the virus made collecting a real challenge: cases are confirmed from various sources and have an overview based on different orders difficult. Because the centralizing of the data can be made using simple rules, an RPA robot can gather data from multiple sources, and send it to a service that helps to visualize easier: like a map or analytics provider.
Conclusions
The COVID-19 crises hit the market, we face situations that we didn’t encounter before. All these crises cause flows that we didn’t hit yet.
As humans, we have our limits, and we should let technology help with the administrative tasks and focus on other things.
Technology is changing the way we think, so RPA will transform the way we work. RPA is a bridge between the way we work today and how we will work tomorrow. Don’t negate, embrace it!
