How enterprise automation saves companies time and money

One of the biggest lies business leaders tell themselves is that their business processes aren’t that bad. Certainly not bad enough to introduce enterprise automation. 

What these executives may not realize is that there are most likely processes in place at the company that are ineffective, expensive, and aggravating for employees. Over time, the cost of inefficient processes can balloon into major issues for your company.

Let’s take your legacy systems as an example, and specifically what’s going on with the workers who are interacting with them. According to a report published by Asana, a majority of employees spend about 60% of their time on “work about work” —  replying to email chains, preparing and attending meetings, searching for files, or even just duplicating efforts.

These inefficient processes exist at every level of an organization, costing your business money and wasting valuable hours in a worker’s day. It’s time for management to face the facts; your business processes are inefficient and enterprise automation is the solution.

What is my true cost of inefficient processes?

Inefficient processes will eat away company resources across all industries and departments. Here are a just a few glaring examples:

• Average cost of a single manual data entry for HR is $4.70
• Average cost of a manual claim status inquiry in healthcare is $10.13
• Average cost of processing an invoice for non-automation users is $8.78
• Manual data entry for accounting takes 30% to 40% more time than it would through automation

Regardless of industry or job function, there are ineffective processes in your organization preventing your employees from completing valuable work. As your employees waste time on these tasks, your company wastes money.

Solutions for enterprise automation

When it comes to enterprise automation, there are a few options for enterprises depending on your needs and level of inefficiency.

If you’re looking to reduce repetitive, rule-based, and high-volume work tasks that specifically deal with web interfaces, look into robotic process automation (RPA).

Our specialty at Automation Hero is the next generation of RPA: intelligent process automation. Intelligent process automation is the powerful combination of artificial intelligence, RPA, and mass amounts of data to automate complex tasks and perform more adaptable workflows.

The key difference between intelligent process automation and traditional RPA is that RPA is unadaptable. RPA performs one action repeatedly without considering nuances or exceptions. For example, if you asked an RPA system to sort red and blue balls, it wouldn’t be able to react in the case of a yellow ball. RPA also can’t learn, so every process must be programmed and changed manually by a developer.

However, when you add AI to RPA, the possibilities for optimization are endless. Intelligent process automation systems can learn, making them flexible in the face of complex processes.  It’s the first technology intelligent enough to handle tedious-yet-complicated human processes.

For example, it would recognize that a ball is unlike the others and classify it separately on its own or alert a human that there should be a third category of balls.

According to a Deloitte report, businesses that implement intelligent automation achieve cost savings between 25% to 40% on average, tamping down on the cost of inefficient processes by streamlining business and improving productivity. It’s estimated that companies are missing about half of the opportunities to automate. By finding these automation opportunities, you can cut the time your employees spend on busy work in half. Implementing intelligent process automation benefits both your company, which will save money, and your employees, who hate performing redundant tasks.