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Fit 15 Months of Work in 12 Months Year After Year 🚀

What could you do for your business, your career, your future if you could fit 3 more months’ worth of work in 2020? What kind of impact could you make? Let’s think about that for a second 🤔 If you work full time (40 hours a week) and you could get 10 hours a week back, 40+ hours a month, just think what you can do. Those extra 3 months of work you can get in a year can change your life.

Now you’re probably saying how the heck can anyone fit 3 extra months of work in a year. Technology, that’s how. Not the basic software automation, upgrading systems, or any cookie-cutter program you have bought into. I’m talking about RPA, Robotic Process Automation. 

A lot of people say they know about it, they plan to look into it, and all the other sayings to delay the inevitable. But the real understanding goes much deeper than automating.

Yes, if you haven’t looked into RPA you better do it now before you are forced to do it just to keep up or catch up. RPA is a service that can give you your life back, allow you to be more productive, more creative, more valued.

If you can make a difference, others will follow. To get others to follow you need more time to do that.

According to McKinsey & Company, every week 28% of professionals spend their working hours managing emails. Most professionals don’t even list “Managing emails” as the main responsibility. This means there is only 72% to truly get the most out of every day.

What if there was a way to automate all your emails? If you think about the amount of time that is spent opening, reading, responding to, and managing emails, it’s no surprise that we lose more than a quarter of our day preparing work for the other 3 quarters.

RPA can give you 28% of those hours back. Ok, well at least 25%. The obvious benefit of using RPA for email is to save time and use that time to bring your abilities more opportunity. 

Here are 3 ways RPA can give you 3 months a year, starting this year…

1. Launch tasks based on incoming email

Think about the tasks you have to perform because you receive an email. In a customer-facing role, that might be providing order information (when did my order ship? Can I get a copy of my invoice?). In other roles, that might be to generate reports for sales or management. In IT, you’ll have help desk requests for password resets. Email automation can take care of a number of tasks coming into your inbox without manual effort.

2. Automatically route attachments from incoming email

Whether it’s an invoice, a receipt for archival, an Excel report, or another type of document, you can set up tasks with RPA to identify the attachment and follow rules for processing. Maybe the invoice is sent through AP processes, the receipt is sent to your document management system, and the Excel report is filed for reference later on. While Outlook automation does exist within the platform, it’s limited by only being able to file emails within Outlook. An RPA bot could file your document or Excel into any document system.

3. Automate outgoing email

The possibilities for automating outgoing emails are endless, but here are a few use cases. HR might need to email all employees within a certain region every other Tuesday to remind them to get their time off requests in before the end of the pay period. Sales support might need to generate and send a monthly sales report to each individual representative with their totals for the month. Customer Service might need to send individual emails to every customer confirming that a recurring order is about to ship. You can also set up bots to send emails based on triggers so that an email only sends if a certain activity happens. 

Automating emails this way not only reduces that 28% figure, but it also helps you to be more agile and on-the-ball. The right information, document, or reminder can get to the right place at the right time, dependably, even if you are out of the office or busy with other value-adding work.

Why wouldn’t you want to know more about how RPA can help? With a compound annual growth rate of 37%, don’t you think you should at least look into it? Being ahead of the curve will give you the straightway. #GetThatMomentum

Wilton Rogers III – wrogers@RealimpactSolution.com