Kali Durgampudi is the chief technology officer at Zelis, a leading payments company in healthcare.
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In today's uncertain economic environment, employers in virtually every industry are contending with the need to execute complex business processes as efficiently as possible. Achieving this is compounded by factors that include a shortage of talented workers, tightened budgets driven by inflation and the pandemic's lingering impact. As a result, the need for businesses to automate as many tasks as possible has become more important than ever before.
Offering virtually limitless possibilities, robotic process automation (RPA) can be used for a wide range of business operations, including customer service, accounting, finance and human resources. Automation software, a.k.a. "bots," can be designed and implemented into an existing platform to conduct complex automation that involves multistep functions.
Based on software robotics and artificial intelligence, RPA can help companies reduce costs, increase accuracy, accelerate processes and improve the quality and scalability of production. RPA also provides extra security for sensitive data and financial information, and it can be applied to a diverse set of processes that people traditionally manage.
Going forward, the uptake of RPA is expected to increase significantly. Gartner, Inc. recently reported that the global corporate spend on RPA software is expected to increase by nearly 20% in 2022. Companies were projected to spend $2.9 billion on RPA software in 2022, and the worldwide RPA software market will continue to experience double-digit growth in 2023.
The objective of RPA is not to replace people but, rather, to reduce the hours they spend performing tedious tasks—which, in healthcare, can include claims processing, data input and patient onboarding. This gives employees more time to focus on higher cognitive tasks—or, in the case of call-in center teams, freeing more time for representatives to focus on customer service.
In the current employment environment that includes the fallout of the "Great Resignation" and quiet quitting, RPA can help remove mundane, dissatisfying tasks from someone's to-do list, ultimately improving employee engagement, reducing burnout and fostering workforce retention by allowing people to focus on more rewarding projects.
In making processes more efficient, completing tasks with greater speed and accuracy, and fostering employee retention, the savings realized through RPA implementation can significantly impact an organization's bottom line.
What To Consider When Implementing RPA
By combining automation and machine learning, RPA can learn and adapt without requiring explicit instructions—completing repeatable tasks quickly and accurately and becoming more intelligent over time. RPA accomplishes this by using algorithms and statistical models that analyze and draw inferences from patterns in data and then applying that "knowledge" in future calculations.
Companies can also adopt software programs that monitor tasks that employees perform to identify steps that can be automated. These programs create a development pipeline of bots that should be developed to provide automation where it is needed most.
For companies that could potentially benefit from implementing RPA, there is a range of factors to consider. By adding an additional piece of software to its systems, the organization will need to either dedicate existing developers to an RPA team or train employees to take on this responsibility. Although the word "automation" exists in its acronym, RPA systems require consistent upkeep by staff members to function optimally.
A less costly option might be to create a citizen development team that's responsible for the company's RPA program. Citizen development occurs when non-technical employees with little or no coding experience build business applications using low-code and no-code platforms. By giving non-coder employees an easy-to-use tool for building an RPA platform, an organization can create automated processes at its own pace by empowering existing staffers to become quasi-developers of RPA.
Measuring The ROI Of Automation
Implementing RPA often requires an investment, but in my team's experience, the reward has far outweighed the cost. By setting up RPA to calculate the return on investment associated with each automation, companies can correlate a measured return to every task that a bot completes. There are several quantifiable measurements that can be calculated, including person-hours spared, dollars saved and productivity gained.
Following the launch of our RPA program in early 2022 and its implementation roughly two months ago, more than 20 bots are currently being used to run more than 160 automations, and we have more than 500 automations in the backlog to be developed and deployed. During this brief period, the company has saved a year's worth of software costs, and we currently project that the implementation of RPA will drive roughly $2 million in savings by mid-2024.
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