Why RPA is your best option for business automation

…and why it’s time to automate just about everything

Because, let’s be honest, we always had ways to automate most of the business processes since the early ages of Information Technology.

We just had to write some software that performed the process tasks or update our existing software to performed also the automation tasks.

It looks simple, right? So why, if we look at actual business companies, there are so many repetitive processes performed by humans instead computers?! According to RPA vendors, up the 80% of processes that can be easily automated are still performed by humans. Which is mind blowing.

Didn’t we have the opportunity, over the past decades, to automate everything just writing some more software?

Theoretically yes. Practically… not so much. This gap has a name which unsurprisingly is money. We can use some fancy term like unfavorable investment, negative ROI etc. but I like to keep it simple: if automating a process requires writing software, it’s very likely that it would cost too much to be a safe investment. That’s why we ended up automating only that 20%, eventually it were the only processes worth spending that much.

“If automating a process requires writing software, it’s very likely that it would cost too much to be a safe investment.”

Solution: just don’t reinvent the wheel

Obviously, writing custom software is rarely our best option. Fortunately we live in a world where often our needs are shared between the market and therefore there are plenty of companies ready to provide with a platform.

And speaking of automation platform we just have to take a look at Gartner Quadrant to find the right vendor for our needs.

Leveraging a modern RPA platform we have the possibly to automatize a process in weeks (instead months) which represents a huge improvement in term of costs and time-to-business.

It is one with zero-code approach, which implies that we don’t have to rely only on programmers but persons directly involved in the business process can be part of the development.

Having lowered the cost of “bot” developments, the ROI for automating our processes becomes positive (5 FTE, 10 FTE… you name it!) and suddenly investing in automations becomes the smartest thing to do.

Moreover modern RPA ecosystem will offer a series of tools that will be soon necessary when having hundreds of “bots” that perform automated task like monitoring and analytics tools, cognitive functionalities, process discovery, ready-to-use integrations with popular E.RPs (and so on), prebuild bots for common tasks etc.

Wrapping up

Adopting an RPA platform enables to easily and quickly automate business processes by leveraging tools from the ecosystem, making it our suggested strategy to maximize innovation investments.