Automating your Little Daily Tasks with RPA

For those of us who are enthusiastic about process automation and the benefits that Robotic process automation or RPA technology generates, it’s always nice to see how RPA use is expanding quickly inside organizations after the technology is adopted on an initial project.

Robotic process automation is generally adopted on an initial project where we look forward to reducing the operating cost of a massive manual operation, like invoice or payment documents data entry, complex document entry, intensive manual data loading into applications, etc.

This kind of process usually takes a huge number of labor hours and once RPA is implemented this cost can be reduced by automating repetitive tasks that are related to technology areas such as document management, spreadsheets, email, document scan, application data entry, etc.

But when RPA enters the organization culture, companies quickly see the benefits of applying it to smaller processes, where volumes of data managed are much smaller, but that nevertheless takes a lot of time to execute. This includes activities such as generating a summary budget report, which could require that several previous activities are completed, like running a report from the finance application, extracting key data, copying it to an excel spreadsheet, calculating some values, and then sending an email with the spreadsheet attached. This kind of task can be automated and executed without human intervention.

By doing this, you can get nice reductions of human labor time that although minimal on their own, add up a lot of time during a week, and can represent a significant number of hours per month or per year.

And of course, this precious time saved (with the additional benefits of fewer activities to worry about) can be used to spend more time dealing with situations that require human reasoning skills that will hardly be replaced.