Seasons change, sometimes unpredictably like was with the coming of Covid-19. As early as January 2020, many people, and organizations alike, were looking forward to an economically beautiful year. 5 months into the year and things have changed drastically, to a point where some of our clients are processing less than 20% of the invoices they used to process. Imagine a shift of 20 invoices a day to less than 4 within the same time!
One of the concerns that business owners have thrown our way is how they can scale down in these tough times and also, when everything is back to normal, scale up in an easy, efficient and timely manner. Of the options they believe they have, 2 usually stand out:
Either of the 2 is a tough decision for employers and a painful one for employees. Additionally, the 2 are short term solutions – not quite effective for a business that is looking at long-term sustainability while creating and maintaining employment for its employees. There’s a need for an effective way of scaling up and down in terms of resources and operations without having to make tough decisions, some with adverse social and economic impacts. This is where Robotics Process Automation comes in.
Did you know that you can easily scale down and up on software robots depending on the change of magnitude of business operations? This can all happen with simple clicks and without having to make tough and painful HR decisions. Going back to our sampled client processing invoices, let us look at the step-by-step invoicing process, including its automation and how the possibility of scaling up and down has been handled.
The process
When the Stores team receives supplies, it verifies them against the purchase orders that had been raised. The supplier invoice is presented as both hard and soft copy. Once verification is completed, the validated invoices are sent to the Finance team via email for processing and payment through the company’s ERP system. The list of suppliers hardly changes, and their invoice templates have been the same for the last 2 years, despite being unique per supplier.
Our automation approach
Using UiPath, these process can be robotized as follows:
With UiPath’s Orchestrator, scaling up and down on such robots can be achieved in an instant. When there’re few invoices to be posted on a regular basis, a few robots can be left to do the work. When the workload increases, a team of robots can be set up and roles divided among them to ensure effective and timely completion of work.
Ready to try this out? We are here to make it a reality. Reach us on rpa@betaedgetechnology.co.ke and get a free pilot aligned to your processes and systems.