ANYTHING YOU CAN DO
The world is watching the 2020 Olympics this week, more than halfway through 2021, so things are still a little hinky out there. That having been said, there’s a soothing nostalgia to the Olympic Games – these dramas have been unfolding for centuries. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who can’t recall a moment from their childhood, gathered around a television, rooting for Team USA. There’s something intoxicating about seeing exceptional people living out their dreams before your very eyes. The errors, to an equal extent, are devastating.
Here’s what gets me about basketball, to this day: the free throw. The most important elements are static – the distances, the ball, the body using muscle memory to make a shot that it’s made thousands and thousands of times before. It is absolutely illogical that professional free throw percentages aren’t near 100. We’re talking about the best athletes on the planet with nothing like wind or turf to adjust for, a shot they’ve practiced for decades, and yet NBA players average just north of 80%.
How is that possible? They are, like those Olympians, mere mortals.
Man vs Machine
Human beings make mistakes, even the very best of the best. We are messy and complicated, and, for the most part, we’re worth the entanglements because we are also complex and nuanced and remarkable. But you know who’s not going to skip a line of data because they’re thinking about the noise their car was making this morning? Bots. Take the mundane busy work off the shoulders of your human workforce, all while slashing costs? That’s one for the W column, all around.
Mistakes are costly. The stakes can be much higher, though, when it comes to compliance. The massive operations expense decrease is a tantalizing reason to automate what you can, but there’s more. A recent Deloitte study found that not only does RPA produces ROI in less than 12 months, but automation users reported the following benefits at incredible rates:
Improved compliance (92%)
Improved quality/accuracy (90%)
Improved productivity (86%)
The cherry on top is that automation is smooth and scalable, meaning the profit margin gains are not just inevitable, they’re exponential. What are you waiting for?
