RPA as a solution to the staff shortage

Staff shortage

The staff shortage is a theme that is currently regularly in the news. Trains are shutting down, construction projects are being postponed and, according to several economists and agencies, the staff shortage is hampering further economic growth. Since February 2021, unemployment has fallen continuously month on month, while open vacancies remain high.

Several solutions are mentioned to overcome this shortage, such as higher wages, more permanent contracts, recruiting abroad or retraining people. What is often not immediately thought of is how to set up the organization even smarter to do more work with the same people. One technology that can contribute to this is automation with RPA.

Rise of RPA technology

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation and is the collective name for automating business processes by means of virtual robots. In recent years, this technology has been on the rise, with large companies achieving good results by investing in RPA. Unfortunately, this was unattainable for SMEs for a long time due to the investments involved.

That is now changing. RPA software is being built more and more easily, and there are now companies, such as VionA, that provide RPA as a service so that you only pay for the use, instead of making large investments in software and knowledge in advance.

RPA as a solution

What you often see in organizations is that, because it is getting busier due to the shortage of staff, employees are mainly busy with repetitive actions to keep the daily business running. As a result, structural solutions cannot be addressed. The fact that there are no administrative staff only makes the situation worse.

RPA robots are ideally suited to take over administrative tasks from employees and can thus be deployed as an additional virtual employee in your organization. The advantages are that they always work flawlessly, faster than people, and can be used around the clock. In addition, they can flawlessly scale with the amount of work, no matter how much this becomes. This gives your employees air again and can focus on structural solutions for your organization.

Deploying RPA

As with any change in an organization, good preparation is also crucial for implementing RPA. This starts with having a clear goal.

After that, it is important that you are able to properly assess which processes are best suited to RPA. Here, the chosen processes must also be mapped out in good detail, developing all possible scenarios.

The choice must also be made for a software solution to build the RPA robots. Here you can choose between packages that you install locally, such as Microsoft Power Automate and UiPath, or cloud services such as Automation Anywhere and Robocorp.

Building a simple robot doesn't require much IT knowledge. However, you quickly come across situations where some programming is necessary to get all scenarios right into the RPA robot.

Once the robot is running, it is also important to monitor it properly. This is because a disadvantage of RPA is that if there is a substantial change in one of the systems that the robot works with, the robot must also be modified.