With automation driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks, this could be rightly called the age of automation. When businesses leverage RPA to optimize their processes, they supposedly witness a reduction of up to 80% in processing costs, and this explains why RPA is the best friend for any business leader. Of the many advantages of RPA, a prominent one is its ability to cut down expensive maintenance costs by reducing human intervention. Maintenance providers that use RPA can accelerate task execution, improve productivity and in turn reduce costs and improve quality.
It is no secret that businesses that establish a strong presence on the market have to consistently strive to increase their profitability. To increase profitability, they have to cut down costs wherever possible, and reducing operational costs in the maintenance department is often the first step that is taken. In this blog post, we will walk you through how RPA plays a vital role in reducing maintenance costs by automating processes.
Streamlining Maintenance Management with RPA
The RPA market is growing by leaps and bounds. According to Forrester, by 2021, four million robots will automate a large number of the front office and back-office tasks. Furthermore, the market is expanding, and that can be seen through the growth of its major players such as UiPath, Contextor, and Automation Anywhere.
When we talk about RPA solving maintenance issues, it could either be software maintenance or hardware maintenance, or both. In software maintenance, RPA automates processes such as application deployment and maintenance. Furthermore, it enables IT Process Automation and IT Service Management. RPA enables the maintenance team to expedite task execution, improve the quality and productivity of the software. Also, it is highly reliable and considerably reduces the risk of failure. This reduces both time and costs incurred.
When it comes to hardware maintenance, RPA helps reduce machine downtime by automatically identifying the defects and triggering a request for its replacement. It is important to apply the right maintenance strategy to decrease operating costs. One could either choose predictive maintenance, preventive maintenance, or reliability-centred maintenance to reduce costs according to the business requirements. A major advantage of plugging in RPA into your hardware or existing legacy systems is that it does not require changes to the existing infrastructure. By replacing human effort with bots, businesses can eliminate the risk of human errors while bringing in 24/7 operations with zero downtime at the same time.
Maintenance downtime not only results in monetary losses but also in the disillusionment of the workforce. This is why the automation of predictive maintenance is gaining traction. Automating predictive maintenance helps businesses to gain knowledge about the equipment’s lifespan and schedule planned downtimes. By reducing the maintenance costs, there is a subsequent reduction in the total manufacturing cost as well. Automating maintenance activities also increases the service life of the system/equipment. This could be better explained with a use case. The client in question is a leading manufacturer of products for the construction, building maintenance, energy, and manufacturing industries. Having a large customer base that constantly required password upgrades, the client experienced increased maintenance costs because the failures in password change caused the system to lock up, leading to complicated retrieval processes. Our dedicated team of automation experts decided to employ UiPath as the RPA tool to implement the solution. Leveraging RPA, our team automated the password management system, and the client witnessed $300k cost savings per year. Thus the automation of manual processes led to significant savings and reduced errors.
Is RPA Worth the Hype?
Since maintenance costs are considered to be one of the major expenses that are incurred by a business, automating the maintenance process would be a smart decision to make. At the same time, the pros and cons of AI and RPA continue to be a hot topic of discussion. However, one cannot dismiss the fact that the pros certainly outweigh the cons. There are proven examples of the competitive advantage that businesses gain through automation. RPA capabilities will continue to evolve and become more intelligent as time goes on. Bots will automate more complex tasks and optimize business processes. The future is predicted to be run by automation and thus RPA definitely deserves the hype it receives.
Read more:- 5 Things Banks can learn about RPA from our webinar with Automation Anywhere
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