Do you really need RPA in your Business?

Irrespective of which business vertical you are working in, process automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are the words which you would come across day in and day out. Every business today is looking for ways to reduce cost and maximise revenue by using these technologies. However not all business processes and operations are fit for automation. This articles intends to cover the aspects which should be considered before jumping to conclusions on implementing automation for a particular business process.

Do I really need it?

• Would this automation reduce man hours? The main aim of any RPA implementation is to reduce the human efforts and increase efficiency. Thus an business which is considering RPA as a solution should work out n th number of man hours this implementation would reduce. The more the merrier. This can also be in terms of number of employees which are currently deployed to complete the process.

• Is the process based on business rules or on human judgement? Processes which are based on business rules are ideal candidates for automation. For example “if customer has provided a copy of the passport then issue air tickets else not”. Rule based processes can be converted into algorithms high can be understood by bots. Some processes may or may not be fully business rules driven and thus may be good candidates for attended automation.

• Are human inputs in binary formats or standard templates? Machines understand the language of 0 or1. If the process requires standard human inputs or human inputs are captured in standard formats such as forms, then the process is a good candidate for automation. On the other hand of inputs are non standard and require human judgement, such processes are not good candidates for automation.

Other factors? Other factors which determine the feasibility of RPA implementation include factors like how soon the process under consideration is expected to change.  Processes which are expected to change in next couple  to  months are not good candidates for RPA. Also if the number of exceptions are high in a process then it would need human intervention and thus RPA implementation would not be as fruitful/

Conclusion : RPA technology has huge potential for all industry sectors but businesses need to take a cautious decision while choosing which processes should be automated 

RPA and its applications in banking sector

Robotic Process Automation although is not a very old term but it has its roots in process automation which has been around since quite some time. Process automation also has its roots in process management and myself being in business process management field for quite some time now (10 years to be precise) can clearly understand how things have evolved from business process management to process automation to RPA.

RPA today a buzz word in the market and is touching almost every industry vertical, BFSI finds RPA very relevant in various business types may it be Retail, Invoice Finance or Dispute handling. 

For the scope of this blog I would discuss how RPA is influencing some of the manual processes

•  Customer Onboarding : Although globally, retail banking is moving towards digital customer onboarding and making the process paperless, there are still many areas where a document is submitted b customer or a handfilled form is submitted by customer which needs to be processed manually by a human and the data is fed into the system. This is where RPA is helping banks in a big way as the tasks which was done by humans is now being automated and robots are able to do such taks by reading the hand written forms or by scanning and evaluating the documents submitted by prospective customers. For examples documents submitted by individuals can be scanned and ots can verify if these documents are as per the compliance needs
• Processing claims : Claim processing is often one of the most human intensive process as it requires human intervention at various levels. However there are many subprocess in the entire claims journey where humans are being replaced by bots. For example, customers are often required to submit various third party documents such as third party inspection certificates, id proofs, etc. Bots are now processing the documents and entering the values on behalf on humans 
• KYC and Due diligence: KYC often requires customers submit their identification documents and banks processing these documents to ensure that they have enough data to make the customer KYC compliant. KYC is one area where RPA is making big changes buy allowing banks to process thousands of records parallely and thus becoming more independent of the human workforce

These are some of the major areas where RPA is helping banks and financial institutions by helping them reduce the dependency on workforce and thus giving them ability to scale up  the operations and reduce processing time for various processes. 

Moving away from Apps towards Atomization

Creating a smartphone app is becoming more of a hygiene factor in today's world. Pick up any industry vertical and you will find that top player in this vertical are vying for client attention on his/her smartphone screen. That said, as per the Dunbar number there there can be only a limited number of apps which a user uses on his/her phone. Thus true winners in this space are those businesses who are atomizing their services, it is clear that business can not meet the ever increasing and changing expectation, thus atomization of services means providing interfaces for other services or businesses to interact with digital platforms and thus create various new and contextual user experiences. 

Return on investment for digital transformation initiatives

The dynamic technology environment today has left the CXO in a midst of a quagmire as the CXO has a limited technology budget and endless potential investment opportunities in the field of technology which could improve the performance of the bank. Clearly there is a need to get at least some guideline on the kind of returns on investments which the bank would be getting for any investment made in the field of technology. 

In this rapidly digitizing ecosphere businesses are still at a nascent stage where most of the industry verticals although now realize that the future is digital but they are either not yet technologically ready to embrace it or have just started assessing the impact of this radical shift in the business models is impacting them and started reacting, there are exceptions though. Banking vertical being most technically inclined to digitization as compared to vertical like Energy or Manufacturing, becomes the obvious choice for this white paper. Every well-known bank today has at least one substantial size project in pipeline where it is trying to improve its digital footprint in one of the three areas i.e. Customer Relationship, Operations or Partnering with Other players in its ecosystem.

It clear that any digital transformation initiative is fruitless unless there is a clear buy in from the top management, in fact most successful digital transformations initiatives have been the ones which have been initiated from CXO down. It is imperative for any organization to transforms its operations into a more digital state in this rapidly digitizing economy. The next question which challenges a CXO is “Which initiatives would give the best results in terms of Returns of Investment?” and/or “Where should the IT dollar be invested to get maximum bang for the buck?” and/or “What kind of returns the top management can expect from these initiatives?”. In order to enable CXO understand the results and ROI, it becomes imperative for a digital transformation advisor to evaluate to identify variables which factor to the success of these initiatives.