Automation and RPA In a Crisis: Digital Transformation at Scale

In a time of global crisis, companies find themselves adapting to new circumstances. Some businesses are focusing on survival that key parts of their operations, such as document processing, are taking a backseat. On the other hand, digital enterprises are growing due to the increasing demands for online products and services. Both types of companies are now facing a rapidly increasing workload and some of them are implementing RPA solutions.

Experts have talked about how the current pandemic is accelerating digital transformation efforts due to the increase in online transactions and processes. Consumers and businesses are ordering more products and services online. And, the demand for cloud services has spiked as well. This is, in part, brought about by the need to support more ecommerce transactions and remote workers.

So, whether you looking for ways to optimize your processes to survive or exploring strategies to accelerate your business, you need innovative solutions that will take some of the pressure off of you. These challenges are easily resolved by automation.

Automation in COVID-19 Pandemic

Automation is a crucial ingredient of digital transformation, so organizations need to have a strategy to leverage tools such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Without this strategy, you might miss out on a new opportunity to improve your company’s workflow efficiency.

Because of the pandemic that crippled the economy around the world, businesses had to find ways to continue operating with limited resources. Automation is the best solution to achieve this. Focusing on automation tools can help reduce costs, support your remote employees, and build business resilience.

There are a lot of potential use cases for RPA during this crisis, including the exchange of COVID-19 information, monitoring of network traffic, processing of loans, management of purchase orders from consumers, processing cancellations and refunds for air travel, and onboarding systems for home-based workers.

RPA can take the place of employees in charge of front-office or back-office to focus on more strategic tasks while working from home. Teams can finish workloads a lot faster than they would otherwise, enhancing customer experience in the process.

How RPA Facilitates your Digital Transformation During a Crisis

RPA is not only relevant during this pandemic but any crisis as well. Businesses have quickly turned to RPA tools once they realized that they could help facilitate and even improve productivity in remote work.

RPA can take over the mundane and repetitive tasks, leaving your employees more time to adapt to the change. With the help of automation, your remote employees can focus on getting more clients, thinking of innovative ideas for marketing, provide better customer services, and boost their productivity.

No team member wants to spend time working on repetitive, back-office work. But these are still key parts of any operations. This is where an RPA platform comes into action:

Delegate Boring and Repetitive Tasks

No one wants to be sitting at home and filling out employee information in excel sheets. It is dull and repetitive. These tasks are significant productivity killers because of the reduced job satisfaction.

Back-office jobs are essential, but they can be boring. Taking it away from your employees’ hands means that they are no longer stuck doing dull tasks. With RPA automation software, your company can build an efficient virtual workforce despite the limitations of the pandemic.

RPA software can automate rule-based tasks, such as data entry processes. An intelligent data capture solution can also convert your documents into digital format for easy consumption.

Compensate for Cost Cuts

Your business might be one of those trying to cut down costs by letting some employees go. It might be a strategic way to minimize expenditure during the pandemic. Still, businesses that do this also face the dilemma of struggling to keep up with tasks left by former employees.

RPA tools can provide bots that are capable of replicating close to human actions while performing rule-based tasks. This is particularly true for intelligent OCR solutions powered by machine learning and AI technology. This way, you don’t have to worry about work being on hold. Automation helps you to compensate for the cost cuts by making sure things get done even on limited manpower.

Additionally, automation can help you scale your operations without additional costs. You do not have to spend time and money on recruitment, training, and constant quality control. Pre-programmed scripts produce consistent output regardless of the workload. Also, you can easily modify automated processes as you take on new challenges or opportunities. You also have the advantage of implementing those changes in a very short amount of time.

Boost Your Productivity

When employees work from home, your productivity will definitely take a hit. It can be overwhelming for a lot of people, particularly those who are not used to the work-from-home setup.

Automation solutions like RPA and intelligent OCR can help you achieve your productivity back — or even surpass it. These types of technology enable your employees to navigate easily through repetitive tasks, reducing the amount of work they need to complete. Instead of manually entering information from paper documents, they can simply run it through the OCR software to extract the information you need.

Automation also reduces processing time. Forwarding a digital document with a predefined workflow only takes a moment than dealing with paper documents. With digital files, information flows quickly and more efficiently between people, departments, and facilities.

Improve Customer Service

Since most workers are at home, businesses would face more customer service challenges than ever before. The primary problem would be how to serve these customers in a quick and efficient way. In order for your staff to solve queries, they need to get access to relevant information as quickly as possible.

With automation in action, your staff can focus on providing meaningful human interaction with the customers. At the same time, your software fills up forms, extracts data, and feeds information to the team when needed.

Get Started with Your Digital Transformation

The biggest advantage of using automation software is that it will get you started on your digital transformation journey. Becoming a digital enterprise is no longer a choice. You need to find the best way to digitize your operations so you can enjoy more efficiency, cut down your costs, boost your productivity, and provide a better customer experience.

Better Collaboration

By helping your entire operation establish a more efficient workflow, RPA allows your team members to collaborate even better than before. Employees can take on challenging tasks together. Because they are not bogged down with menial tasks, they can focus on critical parts of your workflow. This results in faster turnaround times and better output quality.

Stronger Security and Compliance

Paper documents are difficult to manage and analyze. On the other hand, electronic records are much easier to store and secure. In digital format, records can be processed according to different compliance standards. They can be tested against templates and evaluation processes to ensure security measures as well. And, because the entire process is handled automatically, it reduces human errors.

Start Your Digital Transformation with DocDigitizer

RPA will continue to improve as trends arise within the next few years. As businesses continue adopting automation technologies, solutions will only get better. As early as 2021, you will see exciting trends. Various industries are already adopting hyper-automation, which is a more sophisticated type of RPA. By harnessing the power of machine learning, AI, and existing RPA technologies, solutions will begin to process vast volumes of data with very minimal human intervention.

Fortunately, DocDigitizer can help you adopt RPA to improve your operations. The solution provides intelligent document processing solutions that empower businesses during this crisis. Unlike traditional data capture solutions, DocDigitizer allows businesses to incorporate their automation strategies seamlessly into their document processing system, improving efficiency and productivity along the way.