March 16, 2022
Where can you find a solution that automates your processes while lowering costs, gaining efficiencies, and reducing errors? How about a solution that improves the member experience?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) provides these benefits and more. It can transform how your organization works, allowing your employees to focus on high-value activities, resulting in more satisfied employees and members.
The first step in implementing RPA is evaluating your current processes to find “good” candidates for RPA. We suggest starting with small, measurable successful projects to scale and optimize for other Credit union processes.
When determining if RPA is a good solution, ask yourself the following questions:
Does the process occur frequently enough to justify implementing RPA? Processes that do not happen regularly provide little return on investment and usually have unexpected changes that break the automation. Another benefit besides cost savings may be increasing revenue (think processing loan applications faster) and avoiding risk.
How many steps are in the process? Ideally, there should be no more than 15. Evaluate the individual processes, not a combination of processes. Defining the scope helps you be tactical in your RPA planning.
How complex is this process on a scale of 1 to 10? Does the process include multiple business rules? A good test is counting the “if-else” blocks. If more than seven, the process may be too complex for RPA. Additionally, the conditional statements must be expressed in a format that the automation process can resolve. Either all scenarios are mapped out, or a “catch-all” must be in place.
Is the process stable or liable to change? Review the history of changes to the process, in addition to any planned changes, to identify whether it is stable. RPA of a good process will, in turn, requires less maintenance and fewer changes. Specific questions include:
Processes in general and for Credit unions that benefit from RPA include back-office reporting, employee on boarding and off-boarding, document and records management, and customer relationship management. Specific to Credit unions, loan underwriting, debit card fraud processing, and ACH stop payment processing are perfect candidates for RPA.
RPA Bots can be attended or unattended. Attended RPA works in conjunction with the user, incorporating automation into specific directed tasks. It is well suited to tasks requiring human-to-system interaction in real-time. For Credit unions, attended bots can be helpful to accomplish part of a task quickly. For example, suppose customer support employees need to switch between multiple programs and screens to retrieve information while talking on the phone with members. In that case, employees can use attended RPA to retrieve data from any number of applications. It allows the employee to quickly provide information to the member and focus on answering member questions.
Unattended RPA is just that…no user input or attention is needed. Once the bot is set up to execute, human intervention is only required if a change is needed. The bot begins work on its own.
This is where Dewpoint and our partner, Endurium, can assist. We have the professionals and experience to analyze your current processes and develop a list of processes that are good candidates for RPA. If you are still not sure about the benefits of RPA, check out our last blog, “ Five Reasons Credit Unions Should Consider RPA,” or talk to one of our experts.