Studies have shown that Fortune 500 companies lose an average of $31.5 billion per year due to the failure of sharing knowledge across teams. This lack of proper communication and collaboration results in the formation of silos that could have multiple consequences for the business. The growing complexity of business processes and dispersed work environment increases the communication challenges. These operational silos impact the organization’s productivity and efficiency and are major roadblocks to the company’s growth towards success. If you are looking for a way to break down silos and improve business processes, a digital workforce powered by RPA might be the answer for you.
Breaking Down Silos Leveraging Automation
Silos could occur due to various reasons ranging from conflicting priorities and technological barriers to lack of collaboration. Irrespective of the reason, RPA could help eliminate business silos by automating your workflows, and in turn, improving collaboration by enabling the sharing of knowledge across departments. Some of the processes that can be automated to break down silos are as follows:
Human resources: According to a study by the Wynhurst group, 58% of employees stated that they are more likely to stay at a company if they had completed a structured onboarding process. This could be achieved by automating the onboarding process. Integrating RPA into HR processes ensures that the employees are trained properly and are aware of the business goals that they are expected to meet.
Sales: An average firm spends about 10% of its revenue on sales compensation, and hence it is important to ensure that there are no human errors involved. AI-powered RPA bots can be used to build an automated error-free compensation system that could boost the morale of the sales professionals and improve productivity.
Customer service: By automating the process of reporting defects that are found through customer complaints, businesses can improve customer experience.
RPA can be used across various business operations to break down silos by automating processes across departmental boundaries. Organizations that efficiently collaborate across departments and business lines can experience improved customer loyalty and profitability. So, how does RPA do this? Let’s take a quick look.
Aligned business goals: RPA connects all resources using data-sharing workflows and thus creates an environment that is conducive for effective knowledge-sharing. This, in turn, enforces the shared business goals of the organization, irrespective of the way it operates.
Effective data-sharing: 73% of sales teams believe that effective collaboration across departments is critical for their sales process and 8 out of 10 marketers state that silos prevent them from understanding the performance of their campaigns. Automation solves this by bridging the gap between the different available data sources. By enabling data-sharing, automation equips departments with the necessary tools that are required to streamline their processes.
Eliminating cross-department duplication: Automation eliminates duplication and enables businesses to possess up-to-date information. This is done by connecting assets from several departments and streamlining them to help them to be in sync.
People-focused automation: While employing RPA does eliminate business silos and improve productivity, a hybrid approach of employing both bots and humans could reap better results. RPA can be used to move beyond basic automation, and the resulting people-focused intelligent automation can help lower departmental friction and thus eliminate silos.
Intelligent automation is turning into an enterprise-level initiative, and according to Deloitte, 64% of businesses view RPA as a strategic technology that is capable of moving across organizational boundaries. The greatest challenge while improving business processes is connecting people to the corporate efforts to improve business operations. Using RPA, businesses can overcome this challenge and focus on other high-value tasks. The pandemic has further emphasized the importance of connectivity, and intelligent automation can help businesses to improve connectivity by eliminating silos, and in turn achieve their process-innovation goals.
Source: Aspire Systems