Remote Work Has Exposed Inefficiencies: What Do You Do About Them?
February 25, 2022
At this point, likely every organization has realized that remote work requires new processes and strategies to accomplish the tasks teams were once doing in person. With these new processes in place, many are also starting to see the places where human interactions were papering over inefficiencies. For instance, approvals that could once be requested with a few steps to your supervisor’s office now sit in inboxes for hours or days before action is taken. The processes that may have worked fine before are now creating bottlenecks and exposing weaknesses in the business. These inefficient workflows can:
- Cost millions of dollars each year
- Leave customers frustrated with slow response times
- Hurt employee retention as they seek more interesting, high value work
- Cause errors that erode data quality
- Result in fines from regulatory violations
Fortunately, identifying these weaknesses is the first step to addressing them. Rather than attempting to recreate processes as they were working for the in-person world, enterprises can now begin to innovate and improve their systems to adapt to the digital environments we work in today. With inefficiencies brought to the forefront, it’s time to place greater value on evolving processes to be straightforward for employees so that they can make better use of their time and deliver results for the business.
Leverage Automation to Expedite Processes
With human interactions limited in the dispersed world, organizations are now acknowledging the many pieces that exist within their processes that can be improved. Repetitive and time-consuming actions that are still manually handled by employees can be improved with robotic process automation (RPA) to lower the risk of human errors and save time.
Automating repetitive workflows leads to faster throughput on routine transactions, such as claims processing, payments, call center response times and other business operations. By leveraging intuitive automation tools, business users can build robotic workflows with just a few clicks. A deep technical understanding isn’t required with the right solution, meaning business users can benefit from these tools without extensive training or continuous support from IT teams. As business needs change, workflows can easily be updated, ensuring processes remain relevant to the evolving landscape.
Minimize Risk and Improve Resiliency
Manual processes aren’t just time-consuming and cost-inefficient– they also introduce user errors that risk impacting business operations. These errors could go unnoticed, until they cascade across business operations or are discovered during mandatory audits, leading to costly penalties and fines. Organizations can minimize the possibility of conflicts, issues or discrepancies while improving their ability to deliver quality experiences and meet compliance requirements through precise automation.
In highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare and cybersecurity there are often policies related to transaction times, which are difficult to adhere to when processes are handled manually. Engaging automation can ensure around-the-clock compliance to protect against costly fines.
Rocket Intelligent Legacy Automation
RPA is a rapid, flexible and extremely effective way to address newly exposed inefficiencies. While integrated into other parts of the infrastructure, some RPA offerings are unable to work with legacy applications to efficiently automate their functions. With Rocket’s suite of Intelligent Legacy Automation solutions, enterprises can tackle inefficient processes they were unable to automate before with an intelligent script—or robot—written to engage directly with the mainframe application through its existing protocol routines and interfaces.
Mimicking the behavior of a human, the robot can execute a set of actions similarly to human logic. For example, if a process is bottlenecked due to an error in data, like a customer address entered as “Ave” instead of “Avenue,” a robot could:
- Identify the reason code for the suspension
- Assess whether the discrepancy fits a set of pre-defined “correctable” errors, or escalate more significant discrepancies that may require manual intervention
- Fix the error
- Re-submit the process
Rocket Intelligent Legacy automation products understand IBM i and IBM Z to properly integrate those data stores with business processes. Most users begin with prevalent, repeated errors, building the logic to automatically triage and address them with their initial sets of robots. After a short 1–2-week training period, most customers are comfortable writing and testing the robots themselves. After building fewer than a dozen, companies see vastly improved error rates, higher “first pass” or auto-adjudication rates, faster customer service and more.
There’s No Going Back, Move into the Future with Automation
Now that remote work has exposed where human interactions were filling the gaps of inefficient business processes, there is no going back to the previous methods. The Rocket Intelligent Legacy Automation solutions can become key operational tools whose role will continue to grow over time. Customers confidently rely on Rocket Software for the critical systems expertise and always-on support that Rocket is known to deliver. To learn more or speak to one of our team members, click here.
