Robotic Process Automation (RPA) delivers tremendous value to enterprises aiming for efficiency and quality in providing end-user services. Automation has demonstrated its worth across many businesses use cases, including HR and customer service. Let’s look at the financial impact of RPA software, AssistEdge RPA, on a global leader of healthcare technology.
What is RPA?
In simple words, RPA is a software solution comprising robots programmed to automate manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks across all business applications. Hence, the name – Robotic Process Automation.
EdgeVerve’s AssistEdge RPA is one such software that helped its client, Royal Philips, reap the benefits of an automated solution by deploying RPA tools across important business cases.
This article will explore the impact of Royal Philips’ RPA journey with the EdgeVerve AssistEdge RPA Platform. The core objective of this article is to help readers quickly evaluate the financial benefit of automation and robotics on businesses when implemented wisely and accurately.
Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study of AssistEdge RPA for Royal Philips
Royal Philips is a global leader of healthcare technology headquartered in Europe. It manages finance operations through Infosys BPM, employing 1,200 Infosys employees across finance processes. Royal Philips wanted a seamless solution to eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate finance operations.
The client collaborated with Infosys BPM to deploy 550 EdgeVerve AssistEdge bots over a three-year implementation.
Objectives of Robotic Process Automation Deployment
Royal Philips chose RPA to realize the following objectives:
- Automation of 1 million work hours in finance operations over three years
- Efficient, improved, and consistent performance across finance operations
- Centralize operations and foster end-to-end automation across the said domain
The Outcome of RPA Deployment
After a successful deployment of AssistEdge RPA, Royal Philips witnessed both quantified and unquantified benefits, a few of which are underlined below:
- Elimination of FTE hours across 220 use cases
- Reduction in average handling time of payroll posting by 72%
- Reduction in average time spent in cash collection processes by 30%
- Increased productivity amounted to a net value of $993,137 over 3 years
- Standardization of processes, with 59% of use cases completing a full transition
- Changed strategy for identifying processes requiring automation using RPA tools
- Employee morale boosted following the elimination of repeatable tasks
- Increased ROI of 110%
The case study of Royal Philips serves as an eye-opener for enterprises looking for a speedy automation solution. RPA is the answer for all of their present problems. Let’s understand how RPA helps businesses optimize processes to cut costs and elevate profits seamlessly.
Enabling Automation Across Various Finance Use Cases for Royal Philips
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Payroll Posting Process
Payroll is an integral part of a company’s finance process. However, manual posting payroll results to accounting is time-consuming and requires monthly updates.
RPA technology enabled Royal Philips to easily automate and standardize the process, thus reducing average handling time by 72% and eliminating the average hourly cost of $25.
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Cash Collections Process
The manual process of prompting and reminding stakeholders about cash collections is a lengthy venture. However, deploying RPA solutions can make life easy for employees.
With AssistEdge RPA, Royal Philips eliminated 21,320 FTE hours from the cash collections process across two years and gathered nearly $6 million in cash collections in a shorter timeframe.
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Reconciliation Process
The entire reconciliation process can easily consume about one-third of the accounting operations team’s time, just like Royal Philips experienced. However, RPA software deployment helped the client realize a 65% reduction in time spend across the three years.
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Quality Checks
The project accounting team has to deal with the laborious task of conducting data checks and cleansing the finance data received and processed. Relying too much on human hands eats away productive hours and adds to the company’s overall operational cost.
Thanks to AssistEdge RPA, Royal Philips managed to save 85% of the overall time from fulfilling a time-intensive role like quality checks.
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FTEs across Finance Operations
Automation is the need of the hour since finance operations are time and labor intensive.
The client deployed RPA software across various use cases and incurred a cumulative cost saving of more than $10.1 million across the three years of implementation.
Other Benefits Include:
- Standardizing operating procedures using RPA tools helped end the hectic four or five compliance approval stages, thereby relieving customers greatly.
- SAutomating critical finance functions amid remote working restrictions of the pandemic fostered business resilience.
- SEmployees found more spare time to invest in value-added work other than routine tasks; hence improving employee morale.
The Bottomline
By deploying RPA in various business cases, organizations can reduce the wastage of productive hours and per hour cost of hiring resources. They can also better optimize the existing resources for more value-added services.
This translates into increased productivity and higher revenue per year.
Through AssistEdge RPA, EdgeVerve’s cohesive automation platform, Royal Philips was able to gain an ROI of 110%.