Benefits of automation

9 minute read

You should read this first.

“Higher output and increased productivity have been two of the biggest reasons in justifying the use of automation. Despite the claims of high quality from good workmanship by humans, automated systems typically perform the manufacturing process with less variability than human workers, resulting in greater control and consistency of product quality.”

Benefits of automation can manifest in many different ways. From cost reduction and time savings to better productivity and business predictions. It also raises your client’s satisfaction and reassures them to use your services.

We can’t really explain cost reduction in just a few sentences. That’s because cost reduction is present all over the company’s spectrum, but it mostly depends on what you’re automating. Basically, when you automate a certain group of tasks that used to be done by employees, you are no longer required to pay them to do that. As a result, you can relocate them to a different positions inside the company where they’ll make profit doing more important work.

So, it depends on the amount of tasks that you have automated, but also on how efficient workers are on their new positions. It also depends on the cost of monitoring and maintenance of the automated flows that have been set in place. They can range from minimal to considerate. As a result of automation, companies can produce products faster and that alone is the reason for bigger profits. The company can also put more time and money into marketing and make more profit that way.

Automated tasks are no longer being done by hand. So the time to write something, to think of the solution, to investigate, etc. is now non existent. That’s due to the fact that computers are basically only limited to the hardware and network speed. Automated tasks can also be done in parallel. That means that all of them, or some of them, can be done at once. That was not the case when an employee was doing the tasks. Also, a computer can’t have a “bad day” and be unproductive at it’s job.

By implementing RPA, you’re taking human errors out of the equation, which is maybe not a big deal when you have an expert in that field. However, when you have somebody that is not an expert, or when the system is very delicate,  it’s a completely different story. Then you might want to bring the possibility of a mistake down as much as you can and automation takes care of that problem.

One of the benefits of automating a work process is making it more reliable. Meaning it’s less likely that one of the following will happen.

A system consists of many processes. When you improve any or all of them with automation, you can see the benefits right away. The whole system is functioning better, faster and more reliable. When you analyze your system, then you start realizing what you can automate. That way, you constantly increase your system’s reliability and boost the benefits.

Reliability means you can trust your system to behave as expected for a long time with almost non unexpected occurrences. A system depends on it’s components, so if just one component goes bad, it results in the system starts behaving unpredictably and inefficiently. Automation is standardizing processes to minimize problems.

Introducing RPA and automating tasks means that many boring and repetitive tasks are taken out of the workflow so employees can focus on more important tasks. As a result, you can notice quite a boost of productivity at work and it’s not just that. There are many other productivity benefits of automation. For example, automated processes are faster and every other process that relies on them will be faster as a result.

Also, employee morale and engagement will increase because they will have to do less boring tasks. It will also leave them more time to be creative and focus on making better solutions and follow best practices. You can also allocate more time for mentoring students and new developers.

When you’ve automated your processes, you can monitor them better and make better predictions to always stay one step ahead. As a result, you are able to see execution times and you can improve them if needed. Automation divides your process into steps that you can review and improve if you see fit. Maybe even replace some steps with better ones down the road.

It really shows how every process works and why it works that way. If you want to improve any of them, you’ll need to analyze them anyway and introducing automation requires that by default. Making automation a great and natural option when you ‘re reviewing your business and your processes.

Automating your processes brings another benefit that is easy to overlook. It is monitoring which brings the ability of alerting.

Automated processes are fetching, parsing, processing and sending data, states, statuses and other similar stuff. That data can then be used to monitor your servers, services, databases, users, etc. With monitoring comes the ability to add alerts that inform you when something unexpected happens. It’s nothing new and very exciting, but it’s reliable and it comes naturally when automating.