Why Small to Mid-Size Businesses must Implement Automation (RPA) as a Service

The monotonous work that grips organisation wave’s goodbye, as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) has made its mark disrupting the industry. Robotic Process Automation makes way for repetitive clerical tasks to be done in a jiffy by software bots and automation tools. Thereby, it not just reduces human labour but also creates a huge impact on the businesses.  

Ever since its inception, most of the businesses all over the world have started deploying RPA to scale up their manual processes. RPA has been a boom not just to the large and medium-size businesses but small businesses as well. These small businesses are privately owned corporations or private partnerships that have fewer employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Small businesses in many countries include services or retail operations like a small manufacturing company or a small to a mid-sized hotel.

These small businesses have embraced RPA in a bid to escalate their operations. Thus in this age of RPA, it is imperative for us to take a look at all the crucial ways in which RPA helps a small business to grow.

Here are the positive takeaways that Small Businesses leverage from RPA

Prospective Scalability in Terms of Opportunities

In this era, the market demands change continuously. Because of the changing trends, the time that was required to complete a particular task and the amount of the task which could be completed differs considerably and has variations. If small businesses appoint human employees, it will be difficult to handle such variations owing to less amount of flexibility as humans need more time to adapt to process changes. On the other hand, RPA completely eradicates this issue. With the help of RPA, organisations can get done all the manual and regular work efficiently irrespective of the volume or the timeframe assigned.

This flexibility that RPA provides enhances the adaptability of a small scale business and helps the business to perform better with respect to the market trends.

The scalability that RPA provides can be illustrated in this example:

John and his partners own a financial services company.  Their company of 10 Full Time Employees (FTEs) process up to 400 invoices every day and they spend about $150,000 per month on these FTEs to process up to 17600 amount of invoices per month.  This can become very expensive. John and his partners decide to collaborate with a specialized RPA company, such as qBotica, to save over 60% costs and increase their processing time by 75%.

Better Data Management and Intelligent Insights

For humans, it gets difficult to keep a track of every minute detail in a long process, especially when the time frame is short but the workload is high. RPA is smarter in this respect as has the capability to store data at every step and provide for the same when the results or observations are called for in the future. This archived data can be extremely useful, for analyzing and gaining valuable insights. This eventually helps the business to judge its potential, observe the market trends, discover its strengths and weaknesses, and overcome challenges. With the help of the data archived by RPA, a small business can scale up and be at par with its competitors. Deploying RPA John and his partners as illustrated in the example above have access to intelligent data reports and insights to plan out business decisions. They have additionally re-deployed their FTEs to marketing and lead generation initiatives.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

A hotel chain with multi-city properties operated with its staff of 80 employees who were busy with their routine work that included answering emails, recording daily expenses and so on.  qBotica assisted this hotel chain with RPA to automate its daily operations leaving employees to more critical tasks like customer queries and complaints giving personalised attention to all. Small businesses have a budget constraint because of which it is not always possible for them to engage in client interaction whole-heartedly at every minute step.

If RPA is implemented, certain repetitive tasks such as noting down the order, generating an invoice, and so on can be done automatically.

This will result in the reduction of FTEs workload and, even with less number of employees, small businesses will be able to give customised attention to their customers. Therefore, if the customers can interact with the company personnel at every stage, miscommunication will be avoided.

The efficiency of the output will be considerably enhanced and small businesses will be able to gain customer confidence and satisfaction.  

Increased Cost Reduction

No matter how small a business is, certain business operations have to be essentially carried out. If a small business hires employees for its daily repetitive tasks such as keeping track of the orders generated, getting the invoice ready, generating the data to be filled up for the payrolls, etc., it will have to bear the costs as it has to pay the FTEs hired. On the other hand, if the small business decides to implement the RPA system, automating repetitive tasks as discussed above the number of FTEs hired will be low thus, saving manpower costs. Moreover, the cost of RPA implementation is much less when compared to FTE expenses. Thus, this will automatically help in reducing the costs benefiting the small businesses.

In the example discussed above, John and his partners saved 60% of the costs from $150,000 to $60,000 resulting in savings of 90,000 dollars post-RPA implementation.

Promotion of More Business Discussions and Implementation of Ideas

With the implementation of RPA, employees will no longer have to invest their time working on monotonous and repetitive tasks. This will allow them to work on critical tasks in a creative manner which will help in business development. Employees will be able to take part in business discussions, propose new ideas that will boost business, resolve queries, and offer solutions to problems. Therefore, RPA allows the employees working in small businesses to focus more on business promotion, communicating to the customers rather than brooding over mundane functionalities. A marketing agency tied-up with qBotica thus saving over 1760 FTE hours from 10 FTEs in a month.

These employees who were tasked with mundane and regular daily operations now could focus on marketing initiatives to help the agency scale up on revenues.

Reduction of Error

Running a business is next to impossible without indulging in rigorous calculations. In a small organisation, if an employee is entrusted with rigorous calculations, he or she may make mistakes owing to excessive pressure of work, constricting timeframe, or health issues. The chances of this are negligible when the organisation adopts RPA. Hence, by deploying RPA, errors can be radically minimized. A superstore employed 30 employees who were entrusted to manually keep the record of the invoices for bill payments and receivables. This process was highly manual and led to erroneous data entries and calculations.  The TAT to billing cycle increased as the same calculations had to be done twice. The superstore collaborated with qBotica to automate bills payable and receivable process thus saving valuable time that was earlier taken to correct the erroneous data entries and calculations.

Summing up, RPA is an inevitable tool in today’s modern era. Automating businesses process is useful as it reduces cost, helps businesses to complete more work in a shorter span of time, increases efficiency due to reduced errors, and increases customer satisfaction.

RPA is the key that unlocks the door to business success, even in the case of small businesses.