Robotic Process Automation is a high profile strategy which delivers tremendous efficiency gains, costs savings, improved compliance, audit trails, etc. There are countless stories of low hanging fruits being picked at large enterprise organizations returning multiples of 5 and 10 times FTE cost savings through the use of RPA applications.
For SMB client the question remains as can they realize equivalent impacts? RPA does still have impactful potential for SMB companies but the analysis and application needs to be a lot more granular and explicit about avenues of cost savings beyond head-count reduction. In an SMB context, many of the processes that should be automated will see FTE effort savings that will be less than 100% of 1 FTE.
Take an example of order to cash business process, It is possible to collate costs around provisioning (number of orders corrected times an average courier cost, times an hour of warehouse labor, times an hour of admin systems updates, times a cost of cash etc…). These values are always debatable and open to interpretation. Senior managers will accept that there are real costs here and appreciate an attempt to value them. The cost of the impacts of the negative customer experience and potential for retention issues are difficult to quantify. All of these impacts are increased as it relates to the billing function as well.
The business case will detail a % of FTE savings, a % of provisioning and billing savings directly tied to efforts and costs for internal processes and a % of the value connected to good customer service the first time. Even if the executive sponsors chose to discount the cost assessments against the provisioning/billing and customer impacts, the value will still be apparent to everyone.
Another area that RPA shines in is the SMB space is relative to transformation projects. As a business plans to consolidate systems or migrate to the next big technology, there are often legacy systems that need to be maintained during a transition period that can span many quarters or even years. The SMB companies do not have the army of IT staff the big multi-nationals have. They rarely have the budgets to build new API integrations or extend the middleware platform to accommodate the legacy system for the life of the transition. RPA solves this problem because it is so quick and relatively inexpensive to integrate and connect disparate systems.
RPA tools can be quickly redeployed once a process is improved or retired. This quick turnaround time avoids expensive developer integration costs and efforts. The SMB business Analyst has to dig deep to shine the light on all the advantages RPA brings to the table. It has to be much more than FTE reductions to gain traction. These tools are very impactful in the SMB markets.
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