Earlier this year we asked one of our early RPA adopter customers for a reference for one of our prospects.
The customer asked the prospect, “What are you waiting for, why not automate now?”
They answered, “We’re waiting for three months to see how our operations are going into the 2nd quarter.”
The customer said, “That’s too late, by then you won’t have a chance to deal with the operational backlog, never mind automate it.”
It’s a really a good point. We often wait too long before we start something. One of my favorite Peloton instructors often says if you “…waited until you were ready you will never be ready.”. It’s really true. If we put this into context in and around automation (i.e., Robotic Process Automation (RPA)) the facts are pretty cut and dry. There is a massive productivity gap. People aren’t being utilized properly.
Throw in the labor issue which involves people leaving the workforce, finding new jobs and, with inflation at record levels, we are under great duress. Not to mention the slow recovery from the COVID pandemic, businesses have been stung hard and will continue to be pressed to keep their operations in check and start to build back their revenue.
What if you could do both with one broad stroke?
Our best prospects are the ones that can see the writing on the wall. They come to us with urgency and a real understanding of what automation can do for them. They see that hiring people is exceedingly difficult right now and probably will get worse as more options in the gig economy and flexible work situations continue to expand. The pandemic did many things; one of them was to flip the script on the employer and employee dynamic. The worker now has more leverage than ever before and isn’t beholden to geography and salary. That means quite a bit and has long standing implications on the “future of work.”
As an example, let’s dissect the concept of the “business of being busy”. Let’s start with printed/pdf docs that get manually processed. Loads of different industries and businesses use paper, pdf or emails that contains important data. There is very little reason any of these items should be processed by a human to be entered into a system of record. The technology is so robust and affordable, it makes little sense to include this task in a staff member’s job description. So now, if the employee is free of manual processes they can focus on revenue- generation tasks.
There are numerous bots we have created that have eliminated the need for manual data entry in all places across an enterprise. There are solutions that can tackle each touch point of an organization. I often say the goal is to “Make RPA Accessible for Everyone”, in practicality it is available and free to use, but its adoption to make it prevalent is not yet realized.
Bottom line, the time is now. And while the pandemic and subsequent world-wide issues that followed have expedited the need for RPA, we were always heading in the direction of automation. The technology and the access to that technology is there – whether you want to tackle a big automation project or a small one. CampTek Software can help you and will be with you at every step of the way.
Written by: Peter Camp, CTO & Founder, CampTek Software
