Using RPA to Free Employees’ Time for More Important Work

Robotic process automation (RPA) is truly transformative, with software robots handling repetitive and high-volume tasks like moving files, filling out forms, and extracting data from emails. RPA frees human workers to focus on the things they do best and enjoy more, like interacting with customers and collaborating on innovative business projects. IT Central Station members who use UiPath shared their experiences and insights into how RPA frees people up to do more important work.

Time savings

No matter the industry, IT Central Station members are fully utilizing RPA so employees can concentrate on more valuable work. For instance, a head of business applications at a legal firm said, “Our strategy was to try and free up as much time for our lawyers as possible to make sure they weren't bogged down with work. It gives them more time to focus on the clients and work up better relationships with them.”

Larry H., a systems administrator at a large insurance agency, estimated that his company saves between 20 and 40 hours a day with RPA. He said, “Our organization has improved because of the time savings. We've got robots now taking 10 seconds to do what people were taking four to six minutes to do. It's a whole department of people that are now free to do other things.”

Similarly, an automation lead at a major manufacturing company recalled a high-visibility data entry project that all of their retail managers were spending time on. “The data was fed through to a vendor that we franchise through, and they were spending an hour or two a week across hundreds of locations. We took that into the back office and got data feeds for all the data they were putting in, and then had a bot go through to the current system of reporting and enter that data for every single store location. We were able to free up those managers with a bunch of time. It was about 5,500 hours a year.”

The same rang true for an automation consultant at a manufacturing company. “In our company, we have a lot of use cases where we were able to implement unattended automation. This meant that we saved a lot of time and we were able to reutilize the employees for more useful engagements.”

A managing associate at a different legal firm concurred, saying, “Our processing time was reduced to half an hour from something that would have taken up the whole day (eight hours). This has freed up our legal staff’s time to focus on more important and strategic tasks.”

Happier employees

These IT Central Station members have seen an increase in employee satisfaction thanks to RPA. An RPA developer at a consultancy explained that employees who work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle fewer tasks. The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, doing the same thing over and over and not enjoying what they’re doing. He noted, “A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.”

Aaron F., a process system administrator at a manufacturing company, has also seen performance benefits with his staff. His employees are happy with the things the company has automated so far. They're just glad to be relieved of some of that tedious work.

Combating monotony at work

Doing the same thing over and over every day can be tough on workers. Margaret A., a web developer at a federal executive department, spoke to this issue when she said, “I think there's a lot of value in being able to free up people from doing small repetitive tasks and just be more strategic-focused.”

Sahil S., a senior associate at a marketing services firm, agreed that UiPath allows employees to delegate mundane tasks to their personal automations. In his experience, RPA saves them time and allows them to perform more important functions. As he put it, “In the entirety of our automation effort, this has been a primary driver for all of the new use cases. It's a huge plus for us.”

A robotic and intelligent automation lead at a consultancy had the same reaction. Their employees benefit because sometimes they get bored with the repetitive jobs they have to do at work. Now, as he remarked, “They can use automation and apply their brains somewhere fruitful.” The same goes for a senior consultant at a marketing services firm, who revealed that “We have helped our customers to reduce some of their manual work, but they also benefit by freeing up their time to use elsewhere. Some of the processes we automated had people spending hours locked up trying to finish.”

Learn more about what IT Central Station members think about RPA and its impact on employees.