Imagine a working environment where all employees have a 'Digital Workmate' who is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.
The digital workmate is able to take on the most mundane of tasks on behalf of their human counterparts to enable the everyday worker to flourish in their job role – applying subjective judgement in problem solving.
Every now and again, new ideas and inventions come along and have the potential to change the way we do things on a daily basis. Personal computing was one such creative concept that has changed the workplace, just as much as how social media and smart phones have changed our personal lives. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest innovation that will have a dramatic impact on the workplace of the future.
Cevitr as a business recognises the immense value of digitally empowering a workforce to deliver great business outcomes, and in RPA and AI we now have the technology and the means to enable this across all workplace environments.
It is fairly straightforward to make a 'business case' to deploy RPA – at the outset, the business can evaluate the cost benefit, time and money saved and their return on investment. The realisation that businesses have after dipping their toes in the RPA pool is the consequential benefits of integrating the digital workmate into their processes. Four months into launching our market proposition we have some real-life examples that demonstrate the benefits of deploying RPA beyond a ‘business case’ outcome.
CASE STUDY 1: HEALTHCARE - INCREASED SALES GROWTH
The first case in point that we would like to highlight is of an established and growing business in the healthcare sector where the original business case to deploy RPA was 'cost reduction'.
The business relies on the relationship between three key stakeholders – their employees who are the subject matter experts (SME), the influencer who is an independent advocate for the business and the client. After the 'handshake', the relationship between all three stakeholders is formalised by processing information and payment details through CRM and field software. While building these vital relationships that drive the company forward are entirely in the remit of human interaction, the cost and time taken to process the data was high and inefficient. This resulted in being counter intuitive to the bond of trust created while securing the business.
The company decided to deploy RPA to handle these processes and provide a digital workmate for the SME. The outcomes of this are staggering as the business witnessed greater than 30% improvement in client satisfaction and more than 70% increase in influencer satisfaction. The combination of these resulted in a 20% increase in quarterly sales growth. Their original imperative of 'cost reduction' has now been eclipsed by the fact that the business was able to deploy RPA to automate a process that established a much closer bond between the provider, influencer and the client. Yes, the business has taken cost out by over 50% as a direct result of deploying RPA but the consequential outcome of increased sales growth is much more dramatic and an outcome that was not a part of the original business case. All of this was achieved because the working time of an SME was freed up as a result of automation, and this time was utilised to take on an activity that was simply not on service providers priorities.
CASE STUDY 2: MARKETING AND PR-UPSELL ACROSS EXISTING CLIENT BASE
The second case that we would like to highlight is of a marketing and public relations firm that wanted to explore new ways in which it could serve its clients better without impacting its cost base. While having the ability to differentiate itself from its competitors by offering more for the same price. The client is involved in producing analytics for its customers which requires data aggregation from multiple sources and then using the intellect of the human worker to provide meaningful insight to its clients.
Pareto’s 80:20 principle which states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, had become a business conundrum for this company. The business spent 80% of their time on data aggregation and 20% on producing the insight. This also constrained them from increasing the frequency at which they provided insights to their clients. A conventional business case driven approach would have made this unviable for the marketing firm but with Cevitr’s RPA-as-a-Service solution coupled with a Zero CapEx model the process of data aggregation was automated in a matter of 7 days. The outcomes for our client are equally dramatic as their 80:20 conundrum, it has been turned on its head and is now an incredible 5:95 model. This has resulted in the firm being able to provide its clients with the same insight on a weekly basis instead of a monthly basis at no extra costs. 2 months down the line the marketing firm has now been able to upsell across its client base and increase its volume of business with its clients by over 60% and all because they were able to do more for the same cost base as compared to their direct competitors.
CASE STUDY 3: SOCIAL SELLING START-UP - REDUCED RISK AND FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS TO TAKE ON THE GOLIATHS IN THEIR WORLD
The third case that we would like to highlight is how a social selling start-up with limited financial resources was able to scale its business to take on the 'Goliath's and launch a new market offering 5 months ahead of the originally planned schedule. Most importantly, they did this without having to make any risky financial investments as they created a capability that would be effective in servicing its customers.
The company provides competitive intelligence to its clients when compared with opposing organisations. Quite often competitive intelligence is sought when businesses are required to thwart competitive pressures in real-life situations and time is of the essence. The business challenge that this social selling start-up was facing was in creating capacity to service its clients within a normally acceptable time window. However, predicting the capacity required for a new service and with no historical data to leverage it was a bit of a 'shot in the dark'. Get it right, and the business is able to reap the benefits. Get it wrong and you are left with a mountain to climb. So how did this start-up reduce these risks?
We at Cevitr recommended looking at RPA to create the capacity required. With our RPA-as-a-Service solution coupled with a Zero CapEx model, the start-up would have access to capacity 'on the fly'. This indeed is a significant departure from the past and one where the business model of the start-up itself was able to improve by taking into consideration the capacity 'on the fly' and commit a far more aggressive response time to its clients. So, now that the business has the ability to provide tailormade insights in less than half a day from the time the request was made. Compared to a typical 2-3 days cycle, the start-up’s clients have a tremendous business benefit that makes the service offering of the start-up even more compelling.
For the start-up, the business benefit has been tremendous as its service is seen to be not only unique but also timely and accurate. They have been able to acquire new business earlier (5 months ahead of schedule), faster and with a significantly reduced risk. Now they can take on the 'Goliaths' of the world. For the start-up and for us at Cevitr, this is far beyond what an RPA business case would ordinarily deliver as an outcome.
We at Cevitr are proud to have complimented a breakthrough technology. With our simple business engagement model we can assure our clients that when you engage with Cevitr for leveraging RPA in your business, the outcomes will always be positive and the true benefit of automation truly does go far beyond a business case. Get in touch with a member of our team today to find out more.