Every economy is slowly limping back to its normalcy. Every organization is looking at innovative ways to SURVIVE the next couple of quarters; SUSTAIN and GROW beyond that. Cost optimization and productivity improvements are the most heard SURVIVAL MANTRAS in every organizational corridor. Accordingly, CFOs and COOs have sharpened their focus around these two strategic initiatives.

One critical initiative to get the productivity indices up is to identify unnecessary manual tasks in every function and mercilessly chop them down. Every organization is saddled with manual activities around data collation and consolidation, data entry, data cleansing, data validation and reconciliation.

With proper due diligence to check out manual efforts for the above-mentioned data management activities; one might realize they constitute more than 60-70% in every function of an enterprise. What is more damning is that, out of these manual activities, more than 50% of them might not even need any application of intelligence from the person who is performing these data management tasks – meaning, they blindly keep repeating the task of cutting, copying, pasting, comparing, calculating, formatting data without even needing to think and reason.

This is where Robotic Process Automation or Intelligent Automation or Hyper Automation helps. A software robot can take over repetitive, boring, and frustrating tasks from the knowledge worker and free him/her up for a much higher level of meaningful activity

Robotic Process Automation is a Digital means to automate the knowledge work by mimicking the execution capabilities of that knowledge worker

whereas

Intelligent Automation or Hyper Automation is about automating the knowledge work not just by mimicking the execution capabilities but also other capabilities such as language, vision, thinking and learning (phrase courtesy: Intelligent Automation by Pascal Bornet, Ian Barkin, Jochen Wirtz)

Identifying the hard work and replacing them with smart work would provide appreciable savings.

As Robin Sharma puts it – Activity should not be confused with productivity.

MANY PEOPLE ARE SIMPLY BUSY BEING BUSY.