When the Pandemic spread, the airlines were hit with a flood of cancellations all over the world. One major airline reported 120.000 cancellations within the first weeks of the Pandemic. Each cancellation would take 3-4 minutes to process. Processing these requests would take minimum of 150 people working 40 hours for an entire week. And the situation is continuing. Robotic Process Automation solved this challenge, but how?
Leadership in Test
This scenario is a perfect leadership test scenario. What would you do?
The airline decided to automate the cancellation process and solve the process by using technological tools rather than man-hours. Within six days the company launched a Bot, part of a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) toolset. It automated about 80% of the cancellations with the rate of 4000 cancellations a day!
People often say that crisis sparks the best in companies. Truly, this is an example of utilizing technology to solve the issue. RPA is one of the biggest megatrends shaping the business world. And Covid-19 will accelerate the adoption of automation tools like RPA and AI. Forrester Consulting found that 31% of organizations have increased their spending on RPA in the past three months. Further, 48% of organizations said they plan to increase their spending on RPA in the next year. By the end of 2022, 85% of large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA.
Benefits fo using Robotic Process Automation
Firstly, speed of development and simplicity with no code platforms of nowadays automation tools comes as a surprise to many business decision makers. Implementing process automation elements cannot be compared to traditional software development processes because they are much faster, easier and cost effective to produce. In many examples implementing such solutions take days to weeks instead of months and years with traditional software production.
Another great benefit is the capability to use existing legacy systems as part of the complete process automation efforts. RPA completes the process flow and complementing the things you already have in place. For example in the airline system, creating the bot took 6 days and the system is using existing systems to solve 80% of the cancellations. Hence, cost of creating a bot vs solving the issue with man-hours is far less in short term as well as in long term.
Read more about Business Process Automation.
Summary
Robotic Process Automation adoption is increasing. Therefore, businesses without a proper process automation strategy plan will be outmaneuvered by competition by the end of 2022. Hence, it has said to be among the inventions like fire or electricity, so we all should really consider how to benefit from it now.