How RPA Is Transforming The Shared Services Sector

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the new-age technologies that has successfully taken several industries by storm. Organizations are moving towards RPA because of the benefits that come with its deployment, such as high Return on Investment, and improved overall performance along with cost reduction.

This is especially relevant for the service-related businesses, and this includes Shared Service Centers which protect organizations from economic uncertainty and bring about cost savings. Robotic Process Automation is the boost that Shared Services need to help them bring about a digital transformation.

Do Bots and Shared Services make a good team?

Organizations have always aimed at making Shared Services more cost efficient and the key to achieving this lies in making administrative processes leaner and more efficient. This is where RPA finds space to prove its mettle.

RPA works well with Shared Services because it allows businesses to automate simple, repetitive and mundane tasks. What makes it even more befitting is that these virtual bots which are programmed to mimic human actions take on clerical jobs and complete them in lesser time and at a lower cost. This helps save human working hours which can then be invested in other, more nuanced human tasks.

What does RPA have to offer to SSCs?

SSCs are perfectly capable of digital transformation and RPA is the tool which helps them realize this vision. Here are five ways in which this team works.

Cost reduction: In shifting the burden of mundane tasks on to robots from humans RPA helps reduce the headcount of employees who need to be paid, without affecting the quality and speed of work. This also helps reduce the amount of floor space required for operations, thereby reducing the amount of expenditure on the facility and its maintenance. Training costs and support are no longer a concern since bots are pre-programmed to handle most tasks without assistance.

Improved scalability: RPA increases scalability opportunities for Shared Services and allows them to scale up, whether geographically in terms of increasing the number of customers they cater to, or offering more services. With the help of RPA, SSCs can scale up without having to go through the whole loop of recruiting, training, and managing hordes of new employees. RPA gives organizations the freedom to scale their business without having to employ any extra people.

Increased accuracy and reduced errors: With human intervention at a minimal, the chances of error go down drastically thereby improving overall accuracy within tasks and processes. Also, a virtual workforce is easier to manage, and with reduction in transactional tasks organizations can focus more on the intelligent work that actually makes a difference to clients and the business.

Improved adaptability and security: What this essentially means is that bots can learn, a lot faster than humans and there are lesser chances of them forgetting what they have learnt. As time passes by, certain methods and processes are prone to change due to requirements or technological shifts, and bots are better suited to such changes than humans and their ability to adapt is a lot higher.

It allows for better security of data which is collected from a variety of sources and helps improve regulatory compliance.

Better usage of insights and analytics: When it comes to handling of escalations, RPA has the capability to pick up trends and keywords and change the responses accordingly.

RPA allows processing of data stored in various databases and comes up with meaningful insights based on this processing. Important decisions are based on these insights, and analytics help businesses draw out information from raw data.

With all these multi-thronged benefits RPA has to offer, you won’t have much reason to deny your SSC a brush with this new-age technology.

(The author is Senior Vice President (Sales & Marketing / Products) Newgen Software)