Intelligent Workforces that are Faster, Better, Happier
Robotic process automation (RPA) involves the use of software bots to execute mundane, repetitive tasks, and do them faster and more accurately than humans can. This allows the organization to reallocate these human resources to more challenging tasks, which in turn keeps them more happily engaged in the workplace.
I’m sure you can easily imagine saying, “Alexa, play Shape of You!” as you enjoy an afternoon break. What if you can say, “Alexa, email me my quarterly advertising budgets,” while you’re working with your creative team on the next campaign? And have Alexa send you the report in seconds, which may have taken you at least a few minutes to search and piece together? Wouldn’t you be a happier employee?
For long, work was seen as a skewed bargain — more of the work we ‘need to do’ and less of the work we ‘want to do’. Even for those who love their jobs, there are parts like invoicing, follow-ups, reporting and operational housekeeping that are part of the grind, drudgery that’s unavoidable. As businesses grew in scale and complexity, as companies went global, the things that needed to be done grew faster than what people actively wanted, leading to a nagging dissatisfaction with productive employment.
Organizations that put its people on the challenges of the modern-day and solving real-world problems are the most competitively placed, but it comes at the cost of employee morale, undesired attrition and a reluctance to create a vacuum by moving efficient people to more advanced roles. Because, if you do, who’ll do the need to do’s?
From the Human Workforce to Intelligent Workforce
Intelligent automation is no longer a tactical solution but a strategic necessity — and it is the next frontier in technology where we do things smartly, efficiently and quickly. However, building an intelligent digital workforce needs to be as well-planned as building a human workforce, considering both present and future requirements of skills, experience, and aptitude for an organization.
Depending on the industry, scale, and complexity of tasks to be performed, organizations need to find bots or software robots that suit their needs best. They need to perform their analyses thoroughly, study employee behaviour and identify pain points in their workplace experience in order to better exploit opportunities that can make it better, richer and more productive.
Companies must also consider the cost that comes with such a transformation — financial and opportunity costs. There are various things that define the ROI of a bot: What task can the bot perform? What can it learn? How fast can it perform these tasks? How soon can it learn? How can it apply its learnings and improve? How often does a human need to intervene?
While the advantages of financial cost argue for themselves, the opportunity costs of employing bots to perform tasks hitherto performed by people are more complex. It is only natural that employees feel power taken away from them when software minions are brought in to do their jobs. Employees fear that they can’t compete with the speed, accuracy and 24x7 uptime of the bots.
Yet, what employees will do well to understand is that RPA technology doesn’t remove people out of jobs, it only removes bots out of people. To ensure this, the integration of an intelligent workforce should happen in such a way that employees feel involved, committed and genuinely empowered. It is paramount that the human workforce transitions smoothly into an intelligent workforce of bots and humans acting in concert. And that this transition is not overlooked or deemed less important than the technological side.
For instance, a technical maintenance engineer in a production environment is now more productive at work with the help of machine learning-enabled sensors, monitors, and algorithms feeding relevant data with the least amount of hassle, thereby improving his output and learning at the same time.
The same is the case for financial institutions where, previously, people needed to spend hours together parsing newspapers, annual reports, and interviews to gather enough insights to make intelligent investments. Today, many of these establishments utilize financial process automation bots to gather and present all the disparate information in one place, enabling them to focus on decision-making instead of decision-prepping, giving them the mental bandwidth to showcase their skills and advance in their careers. In the process, it is the company that benefits out of their increased, more intelligent, involvement.
And that’s before you even factor in the added advantage of co-operative organizational culture.
Side by side, a team of bots that provide you with intelligent automation services and people can help their firms build sustainable competitive advantages. The fact that the less important, tedious parts of the job can now be easily automated, allows people to focus more on core tasks, which often include creative, complex thinking and high-end reasoning.
Contrary to what people think, it is not machines at the center of this revolution but people. The real benefits accruing to the company are on account of increased productivity of its human workforce, productivity that’s been enhanced by intelligent innovation and effective implementation.
This is what we at JiffyRPA are striving to do — look beyond RPA to bring people, process and technology together for a true digital transformation. This is our vision for Integrated RPA.
To know more about JiffyRPA:
please get in touch with us https://www.option3.io
