Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is poised for tremendous growth. In 2020, the global RPA market was worth $1.23 billion. By 2030, that figure is projected to be $13.39 billion, a growth factor of more than 10. And when you look at the benefits of RPA, it’s easy to understand why.
Bots work 24/7, with or without human attendance; they reduce error rates; they eliminate the sorts of data-handling tasks that dominate too many of our work days. But RPA is a business process solution, and where there’s a business, there’s a bottom line. If you’re considering RPA for your organization, you need to answer the fundamental question:
Will RPA cost reduction achieve an attractive Return on Investment (RoI)?
The short answer is yes. Below are five reasons why RPA is a reliably cost-effective automation solution for today’s businesses.
| Robotic Process Automation: A Brief Explanation |
| Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is specialized software that operates digital systems through user interfaces. These “bots” perform tasks within and between disparate applications, integrating virtually any system, from the legacy platform to the latest cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) tool. That allows bots to complete repetitive, rule-based processes in record time. |
How much can RPA and intelligent automation save your business?
Find out with the free Nividous Automation RoI Calculator.
5 Ways To Achieve Cost Reduction With RPA
1. Limit your labor expenses.
Because RPA is ideal for handling stable, rules-based business processes, it allows employees to skip the data entry, reducing labor costs while optimizing workforce usage for lower costs and higher revenues at once.
For example, a top multinational consumer goods provider used the Nividous intelligent automation platform—including RPA, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Business Process Management (BPM)—to reduce manual invoice processing by 90%. That saved the business 50% of its spending on full-time employees. This is not to say that RPA will replace human workers; its real value is in freeing staff from rote data-handling tasks, which brings us to our next point.
2. Increase employee productivity.
How much of your staff’s day is devoted to moving figures from one spreadsheet to another? With RPA, all those hours could be spent on revenue-generating tasks, improving productivity and spurring innovation. When you free your staff for more creative thinking, you open up new opportunities for improved business outcomes, today and well into the future. Technically that’s more of a revenue-boosting benefit than a cost savings; but it all goes into the same ledger.
3. Lower IT expenditures.
As we mentioned above, RPA bots operate through the user interfaces in all the software applications at your business. The Nividous platform provides a code-free RPA bot design studio, so you don’t need to make enormous IT investments to start automating.
And by automating IT tasks themselves—including time-consuming system maintenance—RPA saves the cost of hiring skilled IT specialists from a third-party service.
4. Reduce reliance on third-party services.
IT isn’t the only outsourcing cost RPA reduces. With the rise of SaaS for everything from customer service interactions to accounting, businesses are outsourcing more and more of their core processes. Automation with RPA bots provides a cost-effective alternative to third-party services; rather than paying another company, you can set up the automations in-house, and let the RPA bots handle the tasks.
To take customer service processes as an example, one leading insurer used Nividous RPA bots to automatically classify customer service requests. That reduced processing times by 95%, and boosted the customer service department’s productivity by 80%—all without the cost of outsourcing the work.
5. Mitigate costly data errors.
When people do repetitive work, they get fatigued. It’s hard to be as accurate on the 1,000th task as you were on the first—and these mistakes add up to serious costs, with the Harvard Business Review estimating that human error costs U.S. businesses around $3 trillion per year.
RPA bots don’t get tired or distracted. They don’t make typos. And with the addition of AI, RPA bots can complete complicated processes with a high degree of accuracy. In fact, a manufacturer that used Nividous Smart Bots to automate invoice processing completely eliminated manual human errors—and saved more than 1,000 staff hours per month.
Added together, these RPA cost reductions can seriously improve bottom-line savings.
