How We Use Software Robots to Turn SMEs into Lean, Mean, Automated Machines

We often think of waste and low productivity as something that infects larger organisations – like multi-nationals and governments with unwieldy management structures, antiquated processes and legacy business systems.

If you have worked at one of these places, you’ll know they take an age to make decisions, change comes at a glacial pace, and many employees are left wondering how are they making an impact to their organisation.

Smaller organisations – I am thinking of Small to Medium Sized Enterprises and Mid-Market companies with 50 to 1500 employees who cannot afford such luxuries. They need to be lean, mean, and battle-hardened.

You might be surprised, when we engage with these companies, just how much waste we find!

🔴 Manual processes

🔴 Systems that don’t talk to one another

🔴 People copy and pasting data from one place to another

🔴 Paper or Excel-based processes

🔴 Duplication of effort.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is fundamentally about making a business more efficient.

Discovery

Reviewing current business processes together in a Discovery activity

Collectively examining the processes to determine if it is possible to automate them using RPA software. Identifying the best candidates that deliver a good ROI and Quick Wins.

There is a lot of hype around RPA, but it essentially just means teaching a software robot to perform a sequence of tasks on other software applications that normally a person would do.

For example, a robot might be instructed to perform this relatively simple sequence of tasks:

• copy this data from the order system
• paste it into an email
• send the email to the customer
• update the CRM to say the email has been sent.

In many SME business there are routine yet tedious, time consuming and laborious tasks performed hundreds of times a day.

Imagine the time and cost savings if a robot, that never got tired and never made a mistake, could take over some of those tasks.

Experienced staff know the work and which are the “Simpler” tasks that they can give to junior members of the team.

When staff are just following the process and not using business knowledge to make decisions, they are doing work that a software robot could perform.

Methodology

For any automation is about Process, People and Technology. They need to work together.

Once the employees and the leadership team understand the simple truth that RPA is there to take over tedious tasks, not take employee jobs, it is like a light goes on.

Typically, as employees see what RPA can do, they identify other tasks in their workload that they would like automated.

For the company’s leaders it is not about reducing headcount but reducing costs, while freeing up valuable human brains to focus on the things they do best – being creative, solving problems, and creating value.

So, the biggest question quickly becomes not whether to implement RPA, but which tasks should be automated first.

Approach

There are two reasons clients use Ether Solutions instead of trying to do it themselves:

🟢 Firstly, UiPath the market leading RPA technology like all sophisticated tools has a learning curve, hence Ether Solutions experience ensures a successful first automation.

🟢 Secondly, internal IT teams are already busy with existing systems, Automation is extra workload with different skills so using an external provider keeps overheads down while retaining flexibility.

How Long and How Much?

Well it depends – OK that is not much help.

The more steps in the tasks being automated, the more complex it is, the longer it takes to develop and test.

Our record is 14 days from first conversation to Software Robot deployed and working in Production.

Typical timescales are 6 to 10 weeks. For the first automation.

The cost – prices start at the equivalent of a person working full-time on Minimum Wage.

The best ROI comes when a single task is automated and is executed a lot!

All automation benefits from volume of usage.

A single Software Robot can execute 24 x7, that is 168 hours a week. Where a person works 40 hours a week, if the Robot works at the same pace as a person that is 4.2 times the capacity for a similar cost.

Is that a difficult business decision?