ACHIEVE MORE WITH FEWER HUMAN RESOURCES IN LESS TIME

Manual, repetitive, rules-based processes have excellent potential for automation. Some examples include searching, cutting and pasting, updating the same data in multiple places, moving data around, collating, and making simple choices.

Average back-office employees spend up to 80 percent of their day on mundane activities such as filling in forms, making repetitive calculations, and processing orders. Many of these processes are perfect candidates for RPA.

Manual processes are a recipe for inefficiency within the business and for boredom and frustration for employees. Plus, when it comes to navigating multiple screens and capturing customer data, people can and often do make mistakes.

This is not a job for a human, but for a robot.

Automation by RPA is a way to handle tasks that require no human intervention from start to finish. This is called unattended automation. RPA also fits for jobs where a human touch is needed while at least part of the work can also be automated. Such tasks are known as attended tasks. In this case, the robots work hand-in-hand with humans as their digital assistants.

By Gartner’s count, RPA software is now ranked as the fastest-growing enterprise software category in the world. A rapid increase in the adoption of RPA over several next years is expected – according to various sources. A study of Deloitte estimated 72% of enterprises will use RPA by 2020. Another research made by Prevailing predicts that automation will likely replace 30% or more of tasks but only 5% of jobs in their entirety. Training employees in back and front-office to work alongside robots seems to be one of the best ways to improve profitability, unleash creativity, and build so-called “antifragile business”.

In our case, rather than using RPA on discrete projects, Rhenus established two internal teams (Rhenus Robotic Competence Center) in Warsaw and Holzwickede, that act like a lean startup to learn by doing automations. Today, having more than 50 of them deployed altogether, we can celebrate early wins and build trust across our organization in newly implemented technology. Federated model is the way how we embarked on robotics-journey. There is still a primary unit (Rhenus Robotic Competence Center) that defines RPA-strategy, makes RPA-evangelisation, conducts initial RPA-workshops with local process owners and managers, carries out the Proof of Value, prepares a standard set of regulations for implementation including vendors management (RPA-software producer), ROI and maintenance. RRCC helps everywhere to gain momentum and expertise. Other functionalities spread across the Rhenus organization. Meanwhile, Rhenus has local Center of Expertise in Zurich, Switzerland and Tilburg, Netherlands, with their own RPA Champions and modest structure.

The CoE aims to empower the employees to meet business goals by using RPA. It invites every business operation across your organization to identify needs for optimization and uncover opportunities for increasing process efficiency and reducing costs, covering all financial issues with RRCC where the essential automation modeling (=Robots building) happens. Moreover, the local CoE is in charge of preparing the process flow-chart, checking the criteria for being approved for automation, scheduling the “testing” and „go in production,” overseeing the infrastructure (mostly virtual machines), collecting information about errors and exceptions, as well as just keeping in touch with Key Account or Head of RRCC.

Although any company can get started with RPA relatively quickly and with a modest investment, there several prerequisites for success. A CoE is a symbol of an organization’s commitment to managing and growing its process automation footprint.

The federated model, including RRCC and local CoE, enables Rhenus to deeply embed RPA, replace manual workload with robots and throughout make the Rhenus Group Targets more likely to achieve.

One of the crucial Digital transformation elements is the area of process improvement. RPA is a tool that helps to streamline processes and thus achieve massive benefits. Our approach is to concentrate on optimizing processes first and introducing automation second. Therefore we work closely with subject matter experts in every particular process from the customer’s side to make the automation right.

The general aim is streamlining and simplifying of processes (which increases the positive customer experience) and strategic reallocation of human resources to take on more qualitative, sophisticated responsibilities. Every process whether it is: order management, shipment scheduling and tracking, loads tracking and processing, invoicing and credit collections, claims processing, account setup, frauds claims discovery, payroll, HR from hire to retire process, financial reports or master data management, is the sequence of steps that lead to meaningful activity. Some examples of such steps could be managing discrepancies and returns, keying and re-keying information from one application to another, or logging into supplier/customer portals to gather information. We start with task automation picking from the end-to-end process some steps and trying to enhance the robots’ capabilities to get better license utilization or other benefits like error-free level of work or increased customer experience due to speed and correctness.

Assessing the impact of automation on your processes can be done through smaller, pilot studies called proof of value (POV). Our recommendation is to begin with a small initiative, but always bear the larger picture in mind. Speak with different process owners in your company and take a look where are the volumes of time-consuming tasks to prepare a solid business case. With the first POV, you will achieve a feasibility check if a robot can operate in your specific IT environment and you will get measured what the level of the decreased human effort is. When staff sees the benefits in action, future instances of RPA become easier. Another trigger to test robotic process automation might be reducing errors or positive impacting of customer satisfaction. We all have been including the new “Y” and “Z” generations of employees. They have little interest in handling the mundane, repetitive tasks at work, don’t they? While human workers are still necessary to govern the business, their necessity in performing repetitive daily tasks should be massively reduced.

The implementation of automation impacts everyone within a business, not just those who will work with the technology on a day-to-day basis. John C. Maxwell, the law of intentionality, says: “Growth is the only guarantee that tomorrow is going to be better.” Having that in mind, developing yourself to get the knowledge and experience is the best you can do. It is crucial for us privately and in business relations. RPA Project needs the right people, and they can be hired as new talents, but training existing employees to use modern technology and become in-house experts is the recommended way.

We aim to be a kind of gateway to the broader adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the enterprise. The future is now because some of the RPA Vendors developed the next generation of automation called INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION (IA).IA incorporates recent advantages in technology to manage and improve business processes automatically and continuously and consists of Machine Learning and Deep Learning (learn from pattern to classify or predict some events) and Natural Language Processing (understand human speech and context). The main differentiator between a simple RPA and Intelligent Automation are the input-data. IA extracts the desired information even from unstructured data like images, video, sound, flow-text (e.g. Emails) just any data format and makes it available for robots.

RRCC purposely surrounds itself with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem and is going to carry out a few AI-Workshops in 2020 within Rhenus Managers to recognize what are the most pressing business problems in nowadays Logistics to find, if any of Artificial Intelligence techniques could be applied. We would like to help make it easier for business managers to blend robotics automation, analytics and AI.

ACHIEVE MORE WITH FEWER HUMAN RESOURCES IN LESS TIME

This could be the most straightforward explanation of what Robotic Process Automation is about.