According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, 60% of a person’s time at work is spent on work about work and not on skilled work. All those hours add up to a massive amount of lost time. Repetitive rule-based digital tasks, such as data entry, report creation, and email follow-ups, not only slow down an organization but also frustrate employees. It creates adverse ripple effects that are felt throughout the team and organization.
Sure, these tasks remain essential for keeping operations running smoothly, checking progress, and making necessary amendments. But they create just enough friction to limit a workforce’s actual potential while also leading to burnout and disengagement. Some other examples of recurring activities that consume significant time include account reconciliation, transaction processing, and customer service.
This often also shows up in everyday workflows, such as:
- Chasing people for status updates through email
- Searching for the latest file versions offline
- Entering the same inputs across legacy CRM tools and spreadsheets
And many organizations have been operating this way for years and continue to do so. However, the last few years have witnessed dramatic technological changes. Social media, 24/7 online shopping stores, and OTT platforms- to name a few. And now, the advent of Generative AI technology/Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has transformed the way we think, work, and act.
Modern-day employees are part of the same group. They want a more seamless, collaborative workspace. And this benefits an organization as well. But how do you get there? This is where robotic process automation (RPA) can help. These software bots are designed to automate repetitive, monotonous tasks. On the one hand, it boosts employee satisfaction, as they can now focus on more critical, creative, and value-adding assignments. On the other hand, RPA improves accuracy, reduces operational costs, and enhances compliance. So, this is a win-win situation for an organization.
That’s why the global RPA market, estimated at USD 3.79 billion in 2024 is projected to reach USD 30.85 billion by 2030. RPA is revolutionizing the way digital work is done. And UiPath is the leading player in this space.
In this article, we will delve deeper into how UiPath-driven automation can cut operational friction across the organization. And how leaders can onboard UiPath seamlessly into their systems and processes.
The Hidden Costs of Operational Friction
When does operational friction show up? Let’s look at some examples.
1) Insurance claims processing
Agents spend time capturing and policy details (either via a phone call or in person), identifying what’s missing, typing data across multiple legacy systems before actually doing the real work that is validating details, updating systems, and processing claims.
2) Manufacturing plant
A plant supervisor receives supplier invoices and orders from dozens of vendors. People manually match document details and count items before processing payments. This slows production and creates inefficiencies.
3) Healthcare providers
Healthcare institutions deal with mountains of paperwork. Appointment and prescription details, medical test reports, pre-authorization forms, treatment approvals from insurance companies, and medical billing and coding. These details are often captured and recorded in various legacy systems by the admin team or other hospital staff. The process can be painfully manual and repetitive, leaving staff frustrated. Also, this means that patients must wait in long queues.
4) Customer Service:
When a customer service rep responds to multiple generic requests at once (especially on chats) that can easily be found in knowledge base articles/self-service resources. This process often frustrates consumers who have to wait a while for their query to be answered, while draining a rep.
5) IT service management:
Unable to log in? Contact IT. Office Wi-Fi isn’t working? Contact IT. Didn’t reset the password on time? Contact IT. Printer issues? Contact IT. For every minor inconvenience, the general workforce raises a support ticket, overwhelming IT support teams with repetitive tasks. These tiny tasks prevent engineers from focusing on real problems.
These are some of the industry-specific scenarios. Operational friction also often comes to light when a manager spends hours each week nudging their team to complete a simple, routine task. Like finishing mandatory training. Uploading critical work files to the cloud.
Or when a financial analyst needs to retype invoice data across different spreadsheets and legacy systems to maintain updated records. This process is prone to error, time-consuming, and adds frustration or burnout.
How can organizations gain a competitive edge while continuing with such an ancient work methodology? It seems impossible. But that doesn’t mean businesses must discard existing systems or processes. Or invest heavily in cloud subscriptions that are difficult for employees to learn. This is where UiPath can help.
How UiPath Helps: From Repetition to Automation
UiPath bots can log in to systems, move data between apps, monitor email, and call APIs. Using UiPath, you can create bots that perform manual, repetitive tasks such as data entry, bill payment processing, and customer support functions seamlessly. Such workflow automation means more consistent output, fewer errors, and streamlined operations.
This leaves people with ample time and headspace to engage in high-value tasks such as building lasting customer relationships, generating innovative ideas to improve business processes, or increasing partner engagement. Read more about how UiPath can improve operational efficiency.
The impact becomes clear when you zoom into specific business functions.
1) In HR, bots can screen candidates based on expertise and experience, schedule an interview, send a reminder, complete onboarding formalities, assign learning modules, and do so much more.
2) In customer service, UiPath bots can take care of generic customer queries on chat, whether it’s about giving an ETA for an order, sending an invoice, or registering a replacement request.
3) In IT, bots can monitor issues and trigger notifications when a password is about to expire. This helps employees fix issues before they disrupt work, reducing last-minute support tickets.
An annual Global Knowledge Worker Survey by UiPath, based on responses from more than 9,000 workers worldwide, supports this. It found that when employees use intelligent automation (often paired with AI tools), 55 percent saves 10 or more hours per week. This isn’t just another stat. It shows how automation can help employees save hours each week and transform how teams deliver, create, and collaborate.
Case Study:
A leading manufacturer headquartered in Dubai, UAE, was manually managing vendor payments. Sending invoices in unstructured or semi-unstructured formats impacts operational efficiency and strains the workforce. This is when they decide to leverage UiPath Document Understanding to streamline payment processing.
The outcome:
- Invoice processing speed is up to 75% faster
- Reduced workload on the teams; previously they were processing 2,50,000 invoices annually
- Timely payments to vendors and stakeholders, improved client-supplier relations
Read more about the journey here.
Implementation Strategy: How Leaders Should Start
Are you a leader considering automating workflows with UiPath? Here is how you can get started:
1) Map the business goals:
What are some friction hotspots in your enterprise? Identify them. These can be processes with high volume, repetitive, and frequent hand-offs. Example: invoice updating process in a manufacturing plant. Implementing UiPath RPA bots can free your resources to focus on more important work.
2) Strategize the UiPath implementation:
A leader must have a detailed blueprint: want to automate specific processes or implement the project across the organization. For this, first you must bring together a cross-functional team including IT, operations, HR, and business stakeholders. Have them describe the way work actually happens. These findings can help you create a more solid strategy. It must include analyzing existing processes for update, what solutions to implement, and selecting a UiPath development services vendor.
3) Deploy and monitor results:
Continuous monitoring and tracking are critical for comparing before-and-after implementation results. Use built-in tracking, logs, and dashboards to assess data accuracy, time required to complete a task, errors avoided, and other KPIs.
4) Set up governance and scale-up model:
Start with routine tasks. Use these observations to define standards, build templates, and pipelines for new ideas. Over time, leaders can aim for a fully automated, functional process pipeline.
Conclusion:
Unproductive labor can cost businesses time and money while frustrating employees and stakeholders. Time to remove operational friction to drive change, and one of the better enablers on your journey can be UiPath. By turning slow, error-prone manual tasks into fast, secure, reliable automated flows, businesses get more than increased operational efficiency. It frees employees to focus more on strategic assignments and to bring innovative ideas to the company, increasing the likelihood of scaling new heights.
Additionally, it keeps the other stakeholders involved and happier. Consider customers. With UiPath RPA-driven workflows and AI, customers can receive 24/7 personalized service for most of their generic queries. This can help improve the overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) rate while optimizing other customer success metrics, such as average handling time (AHT), NPS, and customer lifetime value (CLTV). And as we have seen, this is just one of the many possibilities UiPath bots can create for your operations.
But to get there, leaders need a customized, step-by-step strategic UiPath implementation roadmap that aligns with their business roadmap, rather than disrupting existing workflows and systems.
Also Read: What Role Automation Plays in Modern Industry 4.0
