Any new business faces an uphill struggle. If it’s not a lack of brand recognition or bad timing, it’s spiralling costs, a sub-par product or one of a hundred different things that could turn a good idea into a financial disaster. Although, the chances of launching a successful business haven’t necessarily improved in recent years, the tools you can use to help improve your chances of survival have.
Indeed, just as modern technology continuously offers new opportunities, it’s also opened up new ways for you to make your business profitable.
Old Routines Create New Problems
In assessing the reasons good companies go bad, researchers at Harvard found that processes often become hardened into routines. By analysing companies that were successful but went on to fail, the researchers found that many of them would often fall into set routines, regardless of how efficient they were.
In essence, once a solution for a certain process was found, workers would stick to it as if it were gospel. By failing to challenge convention and look for a more efficient solution, companies actually stifle their productivity and cost themselves money.
One of the best examples of this is repetitive administration tasks. Although keeping time sheets, processing payments, and logging data are all a necessary part of any business, they’re essentially low-skill activities. In other words, you don’t need high-level skills to complete these tasks. What you do need, however, is time.
Most companies will have a set system that one person/one team of workers controls. While that’s fine in general, a company that’s struggling financially could actually be wasting money on these tasks through its inability to innovate.
Efficiency and Time Saving Through Technology
Over the last decade, robotic process automation (RPA) has become the best way for businesses to soften their hardened routines, and streamline tasks that would otherwise be handled by humans.
Does this technology lead to job losses? Not necessarily.
Today’s robotic process automation software has the ability to work in tandem with humans. Initially, RPA services can be deployed to identify which processes can be handed over to robots. From there, modern systems offer unattended, attended, and hybrid automation. Unattended systems will take control of repetitive tasks without any human input, while the other two systems will aid humans or work in unison with them.
As per Kryon’s results, time savings of 2,900% can be achieved by using the right combination of RPA tools. For any company, the savings will vastly improve their bottom-line. Although it’s tough to assign a financial value to time, entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star, James Caan, believes that time is one of the most valuable assets to any business owner. Put simply, if you can find a way to save time, you’re also saving money.
Conclusion
The only way to squeeze more time out of the work day is to increase efficiency, and that’s where RPA tools come in. By scanning your digital processes and challenging existing routines, this software can find areas of weakness and delegate time-wasting tasks. The end result is a more productive workforce, with money being spent where it needs to be, and saved where it does not.
While RPA tools alone may not be enough to save a failing business or help a start-up become successful, they do provide a solution to a major problem that many entrepreneurs will face during their career.