As a B2B business owner, aren’t you always searching for the best technologies that can help you automate your business to improve efficiencies while cutting costs? Let us tell you about how Robotic Process Automation (RPA) what is you could be looking for, for your business.
It is crucial for business owners, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to have some insights on technologies like RPA for B2B businesses like yours. Small and medium businesses need to always optimize their existing resources and RPA has proven to optimize efficiency in various business use cases. More on this as we move ahead.
Overall, maintaining your business’s operational efficiency, focusing on your core competency, and reducing costs while doing so have become the three major reasons for a business’s success.
How could these three success factors be implemented in your business, you ask?
Robotic Process Automation for businesses is your answer.
In this article, we have covered what is Robotic Process Automation and all about how RPA is used in Business for you to get into the thick of it and prepare yourself to implement it in your business.
Also Read: Top 8 Traits of Successful RPA Companies
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Before moving to Robotic Process Automation i.e. RPA for B2B businesses in specific, let’s know what is RPA all about.
Explained in simple words, RPA is used to accelerate or automate all the repetitive administrative tasks that humans carry out in a business use case to free their precious time that they can use for more important and highly valued work.
Now, just imagine this for your business, for your employees, and even for yourself and it won’t be difficult to visualize how utopian that scenario would be.
What makes it gain popularity in recent times is the fact that using RPA, a similar task can easily be carried out around five to ten times faster than through the manual usage of business applications.
Needless to mention that your business gets all that speed that too absolutely free of errors that are likely to happen by humans while carrying out tasks quickly.
For small businesses, relying on effective systems and efficient workflows throughout all aspects of operations is quite necessary. Clearly, to its credit, RPA for B2B businesses is getting all the well-deserving hype.
How is RPA used in Business – Use Cases
Now that you know what is RPA, here are some ways that RPA for B2B businesses can be utilized to improve your processes and efficiency to a significant level.
1. Invoice Processing
For everyday operations of any small business, the financial processes are crucial, and invoice processing is one of the major tasks belonging to this category. There is no denying that invoice processing can turn out to be extremely repetitive, time-consuming, and complicated when carried out manually, taking a lot of time and energy from the employees.
Through RPA, the whole process can be automated since an automated RPA bot recognizes the files and dissects data from them without having any human input or involvement. Invoicing is one of the most widely used use cases of RPA. It is simple, straightforward, and ruled-based, making it a perfect job for an automated bot.
2. Payrolling Process
You would know what your HR employees feel about payroll processing. Most of them would agree on how tedious and tiring this whole payroll process is. With RPA for small Businesses, you will not need to write checks with your hands or look over the spreadsheets since an automated payroll can be designed. Such an automated payroll system through RPA can easily carry out a large swathe of payments like bonuses, monthly salaries, commissions, wage deductions, etc.
Unfortunately, around 79% of respondents from HR teams of various businesses have claimed that they are not familiar with RPA, and that it is not a part of their company’s current strategy. This could also be an opportunity for your business.
By adding payroll RPA for small businesses, you can support your HR staff with an automated system so they can easily focus on tasks that need their attention more.
3. Reconciliation Process
For your business, there is likely to be a list of processes that may need a comparison of two datasets from different sources but between the same subject. This is also where RPA for B2B businesses can come to the rescue.
A few of the reconciliation process tasks that RPA can easily take care of include claims processing in healthcare and insurance companies and travel expenses processes. All of these free up your HR, finance, and operations employees from working on them, resulting in higher productivity levels and higher accuracy for your accounting.
4. Customer Services
How long would the process be for an employee to manually seek information from every customer for your business and to direct them to the relevant solution? It would take some hearing and say for sure.
While it is good to have human-operated customer services, it’s best to have a frontline of automated bots which take care of all inbound customer service requirements. To make it happen, businesses are now using Robotic Process Automation to automate this process and collect whole information error-free.
With the RPA, the human worker will not need to switch between the applications since RPA automates every single step, including integrating the necessary data sets and automating every system of validating the associated data.
Additionally, RPA will help companies handle customers’ feedback or complaints more thoroughly by setting pre-determined categories and courses of action to be undertaken by the bot to provide faster resolution to the customer.
5. Boosting Productivity
You hire the employees having the best of their capacity to excel in your company; however, if the employees are busy spending hours collecting data or in inputing it, you are wasting not only their potential but also your time and money.
- Your employees deserve better quality work.
- You deserve higher levels of output
- And your business deserves cost-saving where it can
When opting for an RPA system for your business, you are hiring a dedicated automated employee who will get the job done quicker at a fraction of the price.
The reason being these automated bots work continuously and never need to take a break that a human employee will need during work.
Therefore, your employees would have more bandwidth to do the jobs requiring the specialized skillset for which they were hired.
6. Storing Information
80% of data analytics and big data leaders have responded in a survey that they want to solve the issue of data governance. For modern small businesses, big data has become a huge challenge because the volume of data is growing exponentially.
Therefore, sorting through your mountain of data has become important, and RPA can help you with that. Robotic Process Automation’s ‘robots’ who will be at your service can easily swift through large amounts of data without any error or tiredness, and that too throughout the day.
Again, why do Businesses need RPA?
Here are the major reasons why RPA for B2B business has now become a necessity rather than a good-to-have:
- RPA helps ensure that your business has improved profitability as it will help you rationalize your human capital costs significantly.
- Not only is RPA beneficial for saving CAPEX for small businesses, but it is also significantly beneficial for saving your employees’ time. By using RPA, you will give freedom to your employees to use their knowledge and skillset in the tasks that require them.
- With repetitive tasks carried out by humans, there are high chances that errors may take place, and even a slight error in a business can lead to major losses. You can significantly avoid this by using Robotic Process Automation for businesses since the chances of error occurrence become almost zero.
- Due to Covid-19, most businesses faced utter losses, for the simple reason that the businesses were not digitally ready to operate without on-premise employees. When RPA is implemented in a business, you as a leader can save yourself from panic as all the crucial tasks of your business are already automated and are being carried out smoothly without any need for human interruption.
- Robotic Process Automation guarantees faster turnarounds when dealing with clients thanks to its speed of carrying out tasks which is incomparable compared to humans.
- It is just a few years away when almost all businesses will move toward Artificial Intelligence. If you, as a business owner, move to RPA today, there are high chances you will be way ahead of your competitors in the coming years in the field of AI.
Therefore, RPA is not only beneficial for saving your time and money but also helps set you up for a better future in the emerging scenario.
Conclusion
With advanced technologies taking businesses to new levels of scale, companies are now looking for such technologies to help them maintain a competitive advantage in their industry. Robotic Process Automation for small businesses has gained popularity in recent times thanks to the advantages it has to offer to small business owners.
From saving their time and money to giving freedom to the employees to focus more on the tasks that matter rather than the repetitive ones, RPA for B2B business has now become quite significant for the business owners to invest in. In this article, we have covered everything about RPA, from what it is to its use cases so that you can understand it better.
