15 Apr
25 Oct
Are we on the verge of a white-collar productivity revolution?
In a globally competitive market Australia’s high wages have contributed to driving work off shore. Companies like Coles, Telstra, and the major banks have outsourced and off-shored back office work to places like India and the Philippines.
This may all soon change as these companies start applying RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to their business processes. What was once done by Australian white-collar staff, then by low-cost overseas personnel, could in future be done by robots. Already the ANZ bank, according the AFR, has applied RPA at its Indian based back office vendor where it is having dramatic results.
What is RPA?
Simply, RPA is the automation of a set of routine steps traditionally carried out by humans. RPA in its earliest form was born from web scrapping software. With the growth of AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools combined with the concepts in web scrapping, RPA has developed into a formidable tool in the past 2 years.
RPA replicates any process step taken by humans to achieve a repeatable outcome. These new tools offer machine learning and the ability of carrying out very complex tasks more quickly, accurately and consistently than humans.
It does not require any coding expertise to implement but does require a person to have basic understanding of logic and programming structure around decisions, iteration, enumeration and object orientation. All of which can be learned by the very people doing the work currently.
These tools are offered by a range of companies as a cloud based service. It sits on top off an organisation’s normal IT infrastructure and applications.
As a tool it complements the organisation, can overcome resource scarcity, and when combined with the people carrying out the work, significantly increases their productivity.
Where has it been applied?
A number of service organisations, such as IBM, HP and Cognizant have trialled RPA by running pilot programs to evaluate the tools. ANZ have trialled more the 40 applications. Apart from back office administration and reporting, RPA has been in Customer Support & Service Desk, IT and Infrastructure Support, Data Migration and Management, Digital and Online Initiatives, and connecting process islands.
What are the benefits?
On one project in the payments area, ANZ reported reducing the number of staff from 40 to 2 with improved quality and less errors. According to the ANZ's general manager of group hubs, Simen Munter, RPA is not being used as a method of culling staff, and that in the 40 processes currently conducted by robot software, workers had generally been moved on to higher-value and more rewarding tasks.
Most organisations applying RPA report substantial increases in productivity, along with the reduction of errors.
The research shows that savings of 10 to 15% occur in the first year increase to over 50% in year 3 as the use of the tool matures in the organisation.
Munter says ANZ has four main aims with robotics; to improve work for staff, to add shareholder value, to improve customer service and increase the control it has over its systems and processes.
What is the future of RPA?
In the AFR article, it was reported that the value of the business will grow from $183 million reported in 2013 to over $6.8 billion in 2020
Management guru Peter Drucker wrote in one of his latest books that the most significant revolution to come in business is increasing productivity of white-collar workers. It seems that the tools to do this are now with us and it’s only a matter of time as to when they’ll be applied universally in companies.
The challenge will be in the emotions that these tools generate in people about the future of work. This will be the area that most companies will concentrate. How to apply these tools to increase output not to decrease jobs.
I would like to believe that RPA will increase productivity of Australian workers such that our industries can compete without the need to send work off-shore.
RPA offers the chance for people to move into higher value jobs with greater skill sets around managing what the RPA applications do and developing these with a deeper understanding of customer needs and business drivers.
Whatever happens RPAs will change the work we do much the same way that the Internet changed how we live and interact with the world.
If you wish to find out more and experiment with RPA here are some of the companies that offer RPA platforms; Blue Prism, UiPath, Thoughtonomy, and the Institute of Robotic Process Automation - IRPA