The Rise of RPA Adoption Due to COVID-19

Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow and pushes us to discover something new that can help us counter prevailing challenges with ease for a brighter future. In this COVID-19 crisis, if there is any one technology that has shown the promise of assured business returns, it is undoubtedly, the robotic process automation (RPA). This buzzing technology has created ripples in the industry and caught the attention of CXOs across the globe due to its sheer business benefits.

Although RPA has been in use for quite long, what is new is its increased adoption and implementation over the last couple of years. Especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises are slowly but steadily realizing the importance of embracing RPA in their working environment. Why? Due to its unparalleled  capabilities of delivering unique business values and a wide range of popular business benefits, even in challenging circumstances.

Here, in this blog, we are uncovering those unique facets that led to the increased adoption of RPA in COVID-19 times.

If you ask any businessperson about their biggest nightmare, undoubtedly the fear of derailing ongoing operations due to unplanned events will top the chart. Still, enterprises often neglect the importance of business contingency plans and suffer hugely at the time of catastrophic events like power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, and even during public health emergency crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Such unpleasant and undesirable events disrupt business operations to an enormous extent and incur significant revenue losses. We have seen during the COVID-19 crisis how enterprises were forced to shut their operations due to the dearth of required human resources and fear of pandemic.

Now businesses are slowly opening up and the economy is coming on track but a new danger may arise anytime. What will you do then? Shutting the business will surely not be a feasible and sustainable idea. What is the solution then?

Well!! With having a contingency plan ready, you can minimize the impact of such unplanned events.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can help you to run your business operations that are rule-based, repetitive, and require no decision-making. By automating such business processes, you are fully assured of business continuity. No matter what crisis looms over the world, RPA bots can help you up your business running 24/7.

Moreover, by embracing Smart Process Automation (SPA), an advanced version of RPA, you can automate business processes that require decision making as well. Or those processes that are complex to handle.

Thus business contingency plan with RPA and SPA can help you in various ways like:

• Keep business running
• Support uninterrupted business growth
• Insure against risks like COVID-19
• Enable to manage compliances and legal requirements
• Maintain customer trust and support
• Safeguard company’s reputation
• Mitigate risks and financial exposure

One another aspect also we have seen during this COVID-19 crisis i.e. of maximum permissible employee strength. Enterprises were asked to follow a certain percentage cap limit. Although, it was a breather for heavily impacted businesses but not proved feasible economically. As they managed to fulfill just a part of their business orders due to less manpower. By automating repetitive business processes using RPA solutions, you can tackle this challenge as well with ease without having any adverse impact on your business operations. RPA in business continuity planning is thus the need of the hour.

In business, if there is one thing that matters the most, it is the usage of time. But what would you do if you were stuck in a COVID-19 like situation and had to comply with the employee cap limit and also had to process a bulk of data manually? Which employees would you ask to come to the office? Those who do rule-based work or those who handle critical tasks that cannot be automated? We hope you will choose the latter rather than the former for obvious pragmatic business reasons. But what about those mundane repetitive data processing tasks? Well!! You have robotic process automation (RPA) software for that.

No matter which industry you work in, dealing with loads of documents, receipts, invoices, etc., is a part of business operations. Doing it manually does not just consume time but also degrades employee productivity as such tasks can be handled better by intelligent automation solutions and free-up employee time for more productive work.

Using OCR technologies, you can easily extract, process, compile, segment, store, and retrieve data from large data sets. Intelligent automation enables you to process structured as well as unstructured data and thus helps in various ways like:

• Auto processing of bulk data
• Better data safety and work accuracy
• Increased processing speed
• Push for the paperless work environment
• Generate meaningful insights with AI & ML
• Enable employees to focus on high-value tasks
• Greater productivity

Devastating memories of the COVID-19 pandemic are still fresh in the minds of almost every human being that lives on this blue planet. We have seen how the healthcare system had collapsed in various parts of the world and patients had to wait for a long time for COVID-19 testing, reporting, counseling, and diagnosis. There was a public outcry & grief that was hard to see. Even after the best possible & sincere efforts from frontline healthcare professionals, the services were not that fast and efficient enough to serve the masses. But this situation would have been handled much better had the world embraced RPA much earlier.

Popular benefits of embracing automation for public health are:

• You can accelerate Covid-19 testing by 90% with the help of attended bots
• Monitor health status by auto checking body vitals
• Provide genuine COVID-19 updates in real-time
• Helpful in contact tracing
• Patient registration, data processing, billing, and reporting made easier
• Beneficial for faster insurance claim processing
• Gather patient’s medical history on a single click
• Patients can be timely served and more lives can be saved efficiently
• Brings cost-efficiency to healthcare

Another vital aspect of embracing RPA solutions for public safety is their increased usage in the manufacturing process. Whenever a product is made, it goes through various manufacturing stages where human interaction is involved for rule-based processes. By automating work like product preparation, testing, packaging, and dispatch, you can minimize human contact and significantly reduce the chances of any virus carrier. It helps in boosting safety standards of any product, especially at the times of any pandemic-like situation.

Due to these long-lasting and impactful benefits, RPA is gaining prominence in healthcare. According to Gartner, in 2020, only 5% of top healthcare service providers were using RPA but this number is touted to cross 50% in the next 3 years.

This pandemic (COVID-19) has taught everyone a very important lesson i.e. wherever a catastrophe like this happens, it not just impacts the health of individuals but also derails economic progress. We have seen how countless enterprises all around the world, from SMEs to eminent giants, have suffered significant losses due to low demands.

On one hand, enterprises had to deal with the pandemic, so on the other hand, plummeting economic activities created havoc in their business cycle. In such a situation, planning precise business goals, restrategizing business, setting pragmatic targets as per new realities, investing the right resources on the right things, exploring the right market, etc., becomes critical yet challenging for businesses. With a traditional business approach, you cannot get meaningful insights and take the right business decisions in such critical times. Bad decisions can only make things worse in already challenging circumstances.

But RPA solutions can help you immensely in such situations.

Advanced intelligent automation assists you in various ways like:

• Collects data from various disparate sources located at geographically distinct locations
• Processes historic data and using AI offers meaningful business insights
• Helps in improved and faster business decision making based on real data and facts
• Precise decisions help in better sales and revenue growth
• Chances of failure plummet sharply
• Better financial planning
• Optimized usage of critical resources
• Accurate and timely reporting
• Better threat management

Life is so unpredictable, so are the chances of another catastrophe like the COVID-19 pandemic. We may recover from the current crisis in the next few years but the economic devastation it caused will remain etched in our minds for long. If we want to insulate ourselves economically from such unplanned disasters then we must get ready for it from today itself. Embracing RPA is the most needed and wise step in that direction.

The sooner, you roll out, the better it will be for your uninterrupted business growth.