Is RPA your way to go? What’s that Method to Madness?

It was another catch-up call with the COO of one of our customers, as a part of the discussions, she mentioned a lot of new initiatives. But time & again, two words that kept continuously popping up were "Automation" & "RPA". All of this was on account of a demo she saw recently, on how RPA can help bring in remarkably high efficiencies through automation (a human replaced by a BOT).

She was excited about all the things that could be done, the free time that the team would be gifted with and how they could serve the customers better. She already had a couple of processes in mind and asked us to come up with the scope, time & costs for automation. She knew about our insurance industry-specific experience in RPA & excellent record of working on external vendor tools.

The excitement was contagious - After all, it was a big opportunity for us, and the Customer had a deep trust in us! The very next day, the folks from our team sat down to review the expectations and brainstorm on the next steps. Manomay's general approach for any new request, especially a Tech solution implementation, is to first understand,

• The cause of the problem/reason for the request (from our experience, customers will usually be able to communicate the effects as they see and experience),
• If the tech solution is going to solve it,
• If it must be a business change combined with a Tech introduction and/or if the existing tech can alone address it,
• What would be the business value that can be derived from implementing it?

From what we gathered in the call; all the processes indicated by her seemed to be potential cases for automation. But we wanted to be sure, as ultimately, it's about the 'VALUE' that automation can bring to the table. We started assessing the candidature of these processes against our RPA assessment framework - the crucial and critical step,

When assessed, there were a few that were absolute candidates for RPA and a few that were not, for example -

• Claim Lodgment Automation - Most of the claims were reported through the fillable PDF and came in through emails. There was a very minimal manual intervention that was needed, and the process was like data entry. RPA was recommended (Digitization + RPA = Fully automated process)
• EFT Payment Allocation - Under their existing system, they downloaded reports from banks' portals, reviewed and allocated the payments in the system. With growing online payments, this task had been highly repetitive and labor intense. It checked the key boxes for RPA. However, there was a need for manual intervention in most cases as the data in the reports was not completely available. There could be missing policy numbers or customer names, etc. And so, till the data was sorted, owing to the high manual intervention need - RPA was not recommended

We went ahead and shared our findings/recommendations and only picked up the ones that were suitable for RPA. (And it worked! It boosted the company's productivity, increased accuracy, and eliminated repetition, giving them just the ROI they expected) Are you looking to automate your processes? May be assessing the suitability with the help of the above FW would be a good start!!

A few tips for you, as you go through your RPA journey -

• Processes that warrant high manual intervention are not recommended for RPA
• Processes that are highly repetitive and/or highly labor intense are ideal candidates for RPA
• Dependencies on various teams should be verified carefully before automating it using Bots
• Introduction of RPA in the process will lead to change in Process, which should be discussed and approved by the business process owners
• It is strongly recommended that any enterprise scouting for the right RPA tool for implementation should account for all the possible challenges in the RPA journey.

Explore our full suite of services - Here