Written by: Antony Bream, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Rage Against The Robots ‒ Or ‒ Embrace Them To Improve Productivity, Release Untapped Innovation and Increase Job Satisfaction
All companies are reliant upon human beings, IT systems and a combination of manual and automated processes to function, yet productivity levels are at best stagnant and worse case declining. In fact, recent research reveals that the global productivity deficit – the economic value lost by business to administrative tasks – rose 2.6% last year, to £446 billion.
In the UK alone, manual work and repetitive non-value-added tasks cost $40bn in 2019 with 5.6% of this time lost to administration including tasks such as chasing late payments, processing invoices and HR tasks.
But in contrast, the amount of money spent on global investment in IT during 2022 is predicted to be a staggering $4.5 trillion in one year alone.
However, if you Google search ‘the cost of failed IT projects globally’ you return an answer of $6.2 trillion per year from a piece of research conducted by Roger Sessions from 2009, a noted author and expert on complexity, who developed a model for calculating the total global cost of IT failure. Fast forward 13 years to present day and do the math!
And from spending on training perspective, following a dramatic increase of over $20 billion from 2016 to 2017, total expenditure on workplace training in the United States dropped from $93.6 billion in 2017 to $82.5 billion in 2020.
So how can so much investment in technology and training for human beings result in such lousy numbers and low productivity at a time when digital transformation is occurring across all sectors?
Work for most human beings is still full of 'must do' manual, repetitive tasks that are boring, eat up valuable time, and make businesses inefficient or less productive.
People are demanding more flexibility and variety and interesting value-added tasks to work on from their employers. Yet, in contrast, the digitization of user journeys has transformed their online lives on a day-to-day basis, from booking a holiday or buying a car to ordering groceries, but when they enter the office or turn on their work laptops they are still faced with multiple systems and passwords, paper forms, green screens and repetitive mundane tasks.
Inherent systems and processes are designed around manual work creating hybrid processes flicking between automated and manual activities, which drives manual effort, especially where legacy technologies and non-standardized processes exist.
WorkMarket’s 2020 In(Sight) Report, vividly details the very tangible and costly impact inefficient workforces to have on revenue and overhead for businesses, as well as personal profit and peace of mind for employees. The data is clear. Employees consider many aspects of their jobs to be repetitive and open to automation, while business leaders claim that significant portions of their workdays are ideal fits for automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
In fact, according to the report, 53% of employees state that they can save up to 2 work hours a day (240 hours per year) through automation, and 78% of business leaders posit that automation can free up to 3 work hours a day (360 hours per year). Think about those numbers. They’re staggering.
Let’s break down these numbers even further using a hypothetical Fortune 500 company based on the average department of 500 employees and 3 business leaders for each respective department. Those employees make an average of $77,000 per year (or $38.50/hr), while the business leaders earn $155,395 per year (or $77/hr). The magic of math reveals that employees who save 240 hours/year offer their employers $9,240 in savings annually, while business leaders who save 360 hours per year generate $27,720 in savings.
Total savings for the average department: $4,620,000 (employees) + $83,160 (business leaders) = $4,700,000. In one year!
Now, with automation and AI, enterprises can increase the productivity of their most important and expensive asset — their people — while offering employees time to reinvest in their careers and professional development.
But companies have another phenomenon to deal with, The Great Resignation of 2021 driven by the impact and consequences of Covid-19 related lockdowns and people using that time and experiencing a major shift in their life attitudes to reflect on work-life balance and personal priorities.
A Microsoft survey of more than 30,000 global workers showed that 41% of workers were considering quitting or changing professions in 2021, and a study from HR software company Personio of workers in the UK and Ireland showed 38% of those surveyed planned to quit in the next six months to a year.
In the US alone, April 2021 saw more than four million people quit their jobs, according to a summary from the Department of Labor – the biggest spike on record.
So how can companies faced with this perfect storm of failed IT projects, broken and boring processes and demotivated employees turn this around to untap hidden innovation, react to a changing world around them to remain alive and competitive and get the best out of their employees by giving them interesting and challenging work?
One answer lies with a technology called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), defined as ‘a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers’. RPA is effectively computer software that automatically performs repetitive tasks that can be entwined within manual processes to remove the mundane and maximize the employee’s productivity and value add in the tasks they are responsible for in their day-to-day work.
We all experience bots firsthand every day, from a live chatbot helping us find a car insurance quotation to the application for a provisional driving license, automatically extracting the applicant’s personal information from their passport and national insurance number to automate the manual tasks of ID and forms being posted and processed manually.
One of the most important technologies for the development of RPA technology is ‘machine learning’, first invented in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, one of the leading figures in the field of artificial intelligence.
Discoveries on machine learning technology allowed computers to perform many useful actions and Natural language processing (NLP) technology emerged as a result of these trials which began in the 1960s. This branch of science combined AI with interactions between computers and human languages and this combination created a major step forward in the creation of RPA technology during the early 2000’s.
So, for those companies mixing RPA with humans, what are the typical benefits and is there any evidence the use of bots can help companies take this perfect storm head on to protect their businesses and free their employees to become more productive?
One company specializing in this field providing an RPA managed service, Bots for That (www.botsforthat.com), has been working closely with their customers across multiple industry sectors to produce some staggering results:
Benefit Cost Ratio’s on average of 5:1
Productivity Gains of 90%
Annualized ROI Average of 7x
Pre-Process Saving of 2 FTE’s (full time equivalent resources)
There are also many indirect benefits for companies deploying this type of technology to free up their people, maximize their investments in their mammoth IT spending and provide their customers with much improved customer experience:
Bots work 24x7x365
Bots don’t ask for holidays, pay rises, pension contributions or take sick days
Bots make you think and analyze your processes before you deploy them and take a step back to ask those important questions of what you don’t know and why you don’t know it!
Bots can learn and get better, pivot quickly to new situations and never answer back!
Bots never have a bad day in the office and always perform
But why do people fear robots of any kind rather than embrace them. Can a piece of software coded by a human being really self-learn and have the inert desire to want to take over the world and destroy us all as so famously portrayed in the film I, Robot from 2004? And when the numbers stack up so heavily in terms of the benefits for both businesses and humans one would surely need to ask yourself as a business owner how efficient is my business, productive my people and satisfied my customers?
In conclusion, as companies face multiple challenges on all fronts to remain current and competitive, ranging from changed work patterns due to Covid-19, increasing costs to run businesses, constant threats from new entrants disrupting traditional markets to employees wanting a different and better life, the adoption of RPA can be a great catalyst and enabler to effect these changes.
The numbers above are staggering in terms of investments made in IT and people, the days lost, capital misspent versus the quantifiable gains of automation let alone the unknown and untapped ideas and innovation from the people companies employ, their greatest asset.
And as Albert Einstein once quoted ‘I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings’, robots in the form of bots do not exist to replace or make people redundant but to free them up from the repetitive, non-value add and mundane, enable to get that right work-life balance, become more productive and ultimately unleash them from the chains of compromised productivity and job satisfaction.
If you would like to learn more about my company and services or connect to arrange a call to learn more about RPA, please visit my website at here.
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Antony Bream, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Antony Bream, is a business advisor and executive coach working closely alongside founders, boards and their teams to help them and their businesses take the leap to their next level. With a passion for understanding the processes and psychology behind how companies sell their products and customers buy them, he formed Ribbit Consulting to bring that experience and knowledge to his customers to empower them to reach their full potential.
