A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
Director of Global Continuous Improvement at Kohler Co
Revolutionizing Enterprise Efficiency with Robotic Process Automation
Alejandro Gonzalez, shares his insights into successful execution, future trends, and leadership strategies, offering invaluable guidance to organizations seeking to optimize their workflow.
Many global companies still rely on outdated manual processes for handling data. For instance, I recall a transactional department that was hired to manually enter data from multiple sources of information into a simple spreadsheet, such as part numbers, part descriptions, date and inventory quantity to be sent to the IT department to perform a mass data upload to another system. This was a laborious and time-consuming task. While the end goal was valuable, the method seemed inefficient.
What I'm describing is part of what we call 'workflow,' which in simple terms, basically is a series of steps needed to finish a task, like following a recipe to bake a cake. Just like in baking, where you gather ingredients, mix them, and bake them in the oven, workflows involve steps that take input, transform it in some way, and produce an output.
In my professional career, I have spent most of my time focusing on finding ways to enhance the efficiency and productivity of many transactional and manufacturing processes. While I was doing some brainstorming and research to find solutions, I ran into robotic process automation (RPA). RPA is software that has some machine learning capabilities, that ultimately help to handle high-volume, repetitive tasks previously performed by entire departments. A Simple bot can automatically extract and combine information, freeing up human resources for more creative and value-added activities
Applying the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), as I traditionally do in every single project I have ever managed, I planned the RPA integration, which involved understanding inputs, transformations and desired outputs (Plan), developing the algorithm (Do), deploying and testing the tool (Check) and maintaining control over its usage (Act).
When it was time to evaluate the results of RPA, which was the migration from manual to automated tasks in the SPQDC areas I always examined and found substantial improvements:
Safety: Improved ergonomic conditions, reducing physical strain on neck, arms and wrists.
People: Reduced training costs.
Quality: Improved data accuracy, caused previously by fatigue and other physical factors.
Delivery: Times were 80% faster, improving customer experience
Cost: Higher ROI, driving results in months, as opposed to years.
If you wonder where you can apply for RPA, let me tell you that I can easily envision applications across many industries such as marketing, sales, customer care, insurance companies, human resources, banking, financial services and healthcare. If you understand workflows, RPA will help you to increase your efficiency and you will have quality data.
Picture a billing department of a hospital, where their daily activities are to process a large volume of insurance claims and invoices from different healthcare providers. The employees every day need to review each claim, manually to verify the patient’s information, they will need to do some validation to avoid mistakes. After that, they need to submit the paperwork to insurance companies for reimbursement. As you can see, this is a time-consuming process, but also susceptible to errors, even though part of their activity is to check everything and in the worst case could lead to delays in payment and potential revenue loss for the hospital.
If a hospital decides to implement RPA, a workflow could be designed to automate the entire process of the claims processing department, a simple bot could extract the data of each patient including billing information from electronic health records (EHR) and other sources. The bot could perform some validation to ensure accuracy and the workflow could submit claims directly to insurance web portals for processing. In addition to this, another workflow could be designed to track claim statuses, identify any rejections and escalate unresolved issues to human staff for resolution.
As you can see, this automation helps to accelerate the claims processing cycle and it reduces the risk of errors. What I found most important for the KPIs of the business, are the positive results that will be reflected for the healthcare providers improving cash flow, optimizing their revenue cycle management and they can boost the morale of the employees by allocating staff resources into more value-added tasks, which in this case would be patient care and support.
