Using RPA for Small Businesses

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has improved the quality and consistency of work and saved the time and cost for the same. In an RPA environment, bots and other tools do all the hefty and routine work. RPA has made the jobs more comfortable but at the cost of human tasks. And, new businesses have started making their organization RPA friendly.

1. Why is RPA needed?
2. Feasibility of RPA.
3. RPA benefits for small businesses.
4. Challenges of Implementing RPA.
5. Tips for Successful RPA.
6. RPA for Small Business Examples.
7. Conclusion

Small businesses have difficulty competing with larger enterprises having more substantial resources in the industry. Therefore, RPA is usually recommended for small businesses. Small business has a lower number of employees, lower financial resources. So, is it an excellent choice for small organizations with lesser resources? Let’s find out!

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Why is RPA needed?

Small businesses face some enormous challenges for which RPA is need of the day. The significant challenges of small businesses listed in an article by Hiveage are cash flow issues, tiredness, finding and retaining profitable customers, motivating employees, excessive overheads, and staying with current trends.

All these challenges can be tough for a small organization. Large Businesses can efficiently deal with these challenges with RPA. But, if any organization wants to deal with these issues, it needs to deploy RPA technology, whether small or large.

Feasibility of RPA

Before talking about the benefits of deploying RPA in small organizations, let’s talk about the possibility to deploy RPA for small businesses. The resources of a small organization are limited, but if they manage to get an RPA system implemented, they will be saving much more. And it is more effective in a smaller organization as a lower number of employees means less internal resistance to RPA.

Also, automation responsibilities are not divided, helping increase operational efficiency and reducing turnaround times and costs. Moreover, employees are more aware of the functioning of the business process in a smaller business, assisting any difficulty faced in automation by the organization.

RPA proves to be an excellent and reliable solution for growing businesses. Since they consist of a smaller team, the ease of carrying out tasks becomes easy and a staggering growth can be observed with the incorporating of RPA.

RPA benefits for small businesses

1. Scalability opportunities: RPA is specially made to be adaptable to the scale of operations of the organization. Therefore, if small organizations have specific goals, the RPA can be adjusted to such needs.
2. Flexibility: RPA helps to deal with unpredictable changing market needs. RPA provides the flexibility of small businesses where they can quickly change and adapt as per the business environment.
3. Organizational Efficiency and Effectiveness: RPA is also known to improve the workflow process. RPA ensures every action is performed identically, eliminating errors and resulting in high quality and reliable results at a low cost. RPA is more necessary for a small organization considering the limitation on its financial resources. If businesses implement RPA, repetitive tasks such as order generation, invoice generation, and many other jobs you can do automatically.
4. Improved Customer Service: Customer service is essential for small organizations, given low labor resources. The consistency of automated processes makes the organization offer reliable operations to customers giving organizations a competitive advantage. And when it comes to processing where employees have to meet customers in person, employees can do so as bots do their routine work. Also, RPA helps in data analytics, making organizations understand the needs of customers better.
5. Data Management: It is humanly impossible to manage all the details and data in the human mind. RPA plays a significant role in removing data redundancy and managing the data centrally. Exceptional data management helps in analyzing and gaining intelligent insights. Data management helps to evaluate the business performance, strengths and weaknesses, and other challenges the organization needs to tackle. A small business can use this data to scale up operations and gain a competitive advantage.
6. Reduced Costs: In a small organization hiring more employees is difficult considering the finances. RPA is like hiring employees at much less cost. This saving up of costs helps a small organization to grow and prosper. Moreover, if they perform the tasks manually, one-at-a-time will cost more than the automated functions. So, automation helps in getting things at a faster rate reducing the overall cost.
7. Growth and Expansion: As RPA takes up all the routine and monotonous work, employees can focus on intellectual work and strategies for growth and expansion. Small businesses usually have a slow rate of growth because they can’t focus on growth, but deploying RPA will increase the pace. RPA will promote more business discussions and implementation of ideas.
8. Transformation Projects: RPA can also be useful for transformational projects in small companies. RPA can quickly connect to disparate systems helping in these projects. RPA provides small companies with an IT team at only a fraction of its cost.

By facilitating all these benefits, RPA can make small businesses gain a competitive advantage over the company with more extensive resources in the industry. And RPA helps deal with the negative growth trend and may act as a turnaround for these firms.

Challenges of Implementing RPA

As every coin has two sides, RPA technology also has some disadvantages. One of the biggest challenges in RPA technology is cost and complexity. For a small organization having a massive net cash outflow at once can be difficult, and if the technology changes in the future, it leads to further cash outflow. So, it is vital to manage all the resources appropriately before investing in RPA technology.

Tips for Successful RPA

Here are several tips you can use to make RPA technology more successful:

• Standardize processes
• Commit to a clear return on investment
• Prepare to reorganize workers and the workplace
• Maintain a pipeline of automation opportunities
• Clean the organization’s data

RPA for Small Business examples

The routine tasks done by RPA include tasks such as order processing and data entry which can be helpful in any retail business. And also, the sensitive work like payroll management and claim administration in the healthcare industry can be completed with the help of RPA.

Any of the online orders placed on a website, the information is sent to the finished goods warehouse for delivery. Having RPA in this process ensures the elimination of errors and the saving of resources. Major companies in the world, like Amazon, Flipkart have successfully used RPA in their businesses and enjoyed the positive results.

Businesses also use RPA in service industries like healthcare. Healthcare companies use RPA in claims administration to increase the efficiency and quality of the claims process. It can also be used to perform patient scheduling and records management through to account monitoring, data correction, and patient enrollment. This technology is not only helpful to business but also patients for faster and reliable processing.

Deploying the RPA technology helps reduce manual errors and any human discrimination with respect to caste, religion, race, age, gender, or sexual orientation.

Conclusion

When it comes to small businesses undoubtedly, RPA can do a great job in overcoming significant challenges of a small business. And it can also benefit the company through its flexibility, reduction of human error, saving of cost and time, and scalability. Therefore, small businesses badly need awareness about RPA technology, which can help them grow and prosper.

But businesses should only deploy RPA technology should only if investing in this technology does not affect the business so significantly that it can lead to shutting down of the company. Implement RPA only when it promises to improve the business process and shows a clear ROI.

When used appropriately and with the right technology, RPA can be turned into the most useful business tool companies ever need. In this way, using RPA bots later or soon will become a necessity to gain a competitive advantage.

   

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