Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Does your company spend too much effort on time-consuming, repetitive and menial office tasks that require jumping from application to application, completing tasks that require little thinking?

If so, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help.

Increasing the productivity of your business is becoming more important than ever, and whilst many UK businesses have already started their RPA journey, there is still much confusion, hesitancy and lack of understanding around the effective deployment of RPA.

Background: RPA is a game-changer for many businesses across all sectors of industry and commerce; The global robotic process automation market is expected to reach $11 billion by 2027¹.

Most office staff spend up to 25% of their time on repetitive computer-based tasks that reduce the productivity. Many routine processes can be automated by using RPA software, allowing your employees to focus their attention on more creative and productive tasks.

Myth busting: RPA does not use robots in the conventional sense; these are software bots, specifically programmed to perform repetitive, labour intensive clerical tasks. RPA is a quick yet effective automation tool, if applied correctly.

The University of Wolverhampton SOLVD project can help identify specific RPA deployment options to increase your business productivity.

Business Benefits: RPA bots will help to automate your menial, time-consuming and repetitive back-office functions allowing your business to reduce human errors and increase your business productivity.

RPA has been purported to achieve up to 65% reduction in human resource, depending upon the specific task, allowing your colleagues to concentrate on more valuable and creative activities.

Global consulting firm, McKinsey, estimate that RPA is expected to unlock £5-7 Trillion in value.

Return on Investment: RPA has seen some incredibly high levels of ROI, with payback often being measured in months, not years, continuing to RPA popularity. So why aren’t you already using RPA then?

Use Cases: Numerous business processes can be automated with RPA. Accordingly, its applications are not limited to any specific sector of industry. RPA has been applied in:

• Application processing
• Producing sales quotations
• Sales forecasting and projections
• Procurement / supplier onboarding / purchase order tracking and parcel tracking
• Data gathering, data migration and data entry
• Report preparation and ‘dashboarding’

Sectors: RPA is already seeing widespread adoption in the following sectors:

• Finance / Banking
• Insurance
• Telecoms
• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Government

RPA is equally applicable to any form of commercial or industrial activities involving the automation of data entry, data extraction, invoice processing, etc.

What is the best RPA tool for my business?

There is no such thing as “the best” RPA tool; the right solution depends on your specific business’ automation needs.

The SOLVD team can help you review your processes to identify the best and most cost-effective RPA tool for your business.

RPA Starting Points: To make sure you get the best benefit, we recommend that you start small and scale up, by selecting impactful yet easy to automate processes which tend to be:

• Impacting both cost and revenues
• Rules-based
• Company-specific
• High volume
• With low fault tolerance
• Error-prone
• Speed-sensitive
• Requiring irregular labour
• Discrete processes that require coordination across multiple departments or across multiple legacy systems

Understanding Common Pitfalls: As with any form of change management, it is easy to lose sight of the main objective. Pitfalls to deployment of RPA can be either organisational, procedural or technical in nature. We can help you to cut through the noise and ensure that you do not get lost in the detail.

How can the SOLVD project help your company?

SOLVD can help you understand the best starting point, based upon complexity and impact. Eligble companies can access 12 hours of fully funded support, (1) delivered by our team of experts. The first consultancy meeting will be to discuss your business administration bottlenecks. This will be followed by a mapping of your existing processes which will be reviewed prior to identifying tasks to automate. 

We will help you identify the most impactful starting point for RPA. We will advise you on the most suitable RPA tools, and deployment timescale, helping you to successfully map out your bespoke RPA pilot.

SOLVD will ensure that your company is empowered with the know-how and confidence to roll out RPA, ensuring that your return on investment (ROI) is maximised.

How long will this all take? Time is money, you know!

RPA deployment is very much dependent upon the complexity of the tasks to be automated, and could take as little as several months to configure, test, and launch automation into production. Simpler problems might be solved in 1-2 months, more complex ones would need a longer timeframe. 

If appropriate a longer term partly funded R&D collaboration can be agreed to support your business with RPA.(2) 

If you are interested in finding out more then contact the SOLVD team on: solvd@wlv.ac.uk 

References:

¹: What is robotic process automation(RPA)? Complete guide [2021] (aimultiple.com)

(1) 12 hours of fully funded support is avaliable to SME's based in Shropshire and Telford. To check your avaliablity, please email SOLVD@wlv.ac.uk

(2) Eligable businesses will be required to contribute 20% of the cost of an R&D collaboration. For further details please contact SOLVD@wlv.ac.uk