By Jim Sinur
(Aragon Research) – Hiring consultants or temps has been a proven way for enterprises to add additional support to address workplace challenges, problems, or to balance out the workload. Today, enterprises have another option to consider when addressing these issues: Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA bots can eliminate very low-level and repetitive tasks, can assist humans in more challenging tasks, and can quickly calculate and bid on work that is waiting for assistance. Organizations should consider using RPA in managing work to further leverage an elastic workforce. This blog outlines three ways to put RPA to work in your enterprise.
1. Low-Level Work
Knowledge Workers rarely enjoy tedious, low-level tasks. This is where RPA bots come in—they can assist with various inspections, decisions, and actions. Nobody likes to re-key data or check multiple systems while trying to service a customer, partner, employee, or vendor. Why not allow a RPA bot look up all the data that is necessary to service your constituents? Manufacturers have figured this out a long time ago. It’s time to let this kind of work go.
2. Assistance with Challenging Work
When faced with a challenging task, receiving assistance can help solve the problem in less time. RPA bots can be used in scenarios such as calculating probabilities for your next action after listening to a customer, and providing a good set of alternatives leveraging your wisdom and experience. RPA bots can help supplement the experience, research, or wisdom a Knowledge Worker may not have time to acquire.
3. Predicting Work Influxes
Advanced RPA bots that leverage deeper calculations and can look at multiple and fast changing data sources, can actually predict outcomes and anticipate waves of work arrival. There will be management bots that can suggest how to balance your workforce between bots and humans. In fact, bots may bid on work on your behalf whether you own the bots or not. Things are going to get super flexible over time.
Bottom Line
Organizations should use RPA bots for work that needs to be done without complaint or issues, and should save the human efforts for the final say or inspection of work. With RPA bots, the elastic workforce will get even more flexible and manageable over time.