Will software robots bring you a higher paycheck rather than get you fired?

Many people are concerned about the negative consequences of technology. They fear software robots will take over administrative jobs from thousands of people, leading to waves of dismissals and unemployment.

That need not be the outcome. Experts in automation know the 100-50-15 rule:

So, a company frees up between 85K and 20K budget per additional robot it deploys. This budget can be used for 2 investments:

• Activating more robots
• Increasing employee salaries

So why would companies want to increase salaries? Well, multiple reasons may apply:

• It is not easy to find and attract new employees in a booming economy. Many job openings take a long time to fill.
• Onboarding and training new employees is expensive.
• Because of the many job opportunities, retaining staff becomes increasingly difficult.

But do companies still need these administrative workers if software robots do all the work?

We have been robotizing companies for years. And when starting robot projects we have seen many times that companies don’t have enough people to execute their existing administrative processes quickly and with quality. There is simply too much work, and not enough hands (or heads if you want). On top of that, their customers are expecting a quicker turn around times, and higher quality answers because of increased digitization.

Companies also willingly choose to not transfer some processes to robots. For example: robots can free up employees so these employees can assist premium customers.

Robotization can lead to a win-win-win-win situation where all parties concerned can benefit:

1. Companies execute business processes for a lower cost and free up budgets.
2. Customers of these companies get their answers quicker and answers contain fewer errors.
3. Employees get a robot colleague that takes most monotonous and routine chores out of their hands. And the robot also provides a pay rise. The employee can switch to more value-added tasks and is better paid for it. A natural combination.
4. Society has invested in education, and via robots uses the talents of citizens better and creates more prosperity.

We have been robotizing companies for years. Analysts even rate us as the number 2 globally in the field of RPA. And our experience has taught us that the benefits of RPA are not limited to purely administrative jobs.

We noticed early on that there are many administrative tasks in the job of a salesperson: completing forecasts in a CRM package, calculations in Excel, approving requests for quotations through a workflow, confirming deals for financial booking, and more. Thanks to our automation, sales professionals can start a robot to handle many of these tasks for them. And they can dedicate more time to their actual work: interacting with customers.

Another example is a department manager that needs to check each month if everyone in her team has correctly completed their timesheets. Although very important for billing and revenue there was never time for this task. Now a robot checks and notifies the employees who are not yet in order and urges them to complete their timesheets in a timely fashion, listing the missing days. The manager now has more time for direct personal contact with her employees.

So, Robotization and Automation offer a perfect opportunity to any organization to realize a 4x win.

What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below!