Michael Fritsch is the founder of Smarter Operations. An operations advisor, he's consulted startups as well as members of the Fortune 50.
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Many leaders today are in search of ways to eliminate tedious, manual work to increase efficiency and productivity—and wonder how technology can help.
Two great solutions to weigh are collaborative work management (CWM) software (such as Smartsheet) and robotic process automation (RPA). Both can automate manual tasks and run workflows to ease the burden on your organization—but sometimes, it can be difficult to choose which path to follow.
So how do you decide? In this article, I will outline some strategies to help business development leaders determine which approach might be best for their organization.
Start by doing your research on the offerings of both solutions.
First, I’ve found that it is important to define your pain points and understand the processes involved. This will better equip you to weigh your options and make the right choice.
CWM focuses on improving collaboration and teamwork. Such platforms are designed to better enable teams to collaborate, communicate and manage tasks and projects. The best platforms provide visualizations and reports to allow team members to see their relevant information and make better decisions. Most CWMs can also automate workflows, moving your process along without manual intervention.
RPA, meanwhile, is designed to automate repetitive and routine tasks. It uses software robots to automate tasks such as data entry, document processing and other tasks that are time-consuming and repetitive. You should consider RPA when dealing with tasks that are simple, repetitive, and rule-based. Some more powerful RPA implementations can harness AI to deal with more complex situations.
Let’s consider a case in point.
I recently ran across a good example. A retailer was managing their interactions with hundreds of suppliers using a CWM. This tool allowed them to collaborate across the supplier network to manage deadlines and tasks. But their CWM fell short of their needs when it came to tracking price changes.
Many of their suppliers only provided pricing in hard copy or PDF format. Yet, with the current supply chain volatility, prices change monthly. Keeping up with these changes required manual entry of hundreds of line items from hundreds of price lists.
For this retailer, a simple challenge from CWM to RPA made all the difference. RPA is especially useful for its ability to scan documents, extract relevant data and enter it into your system of record. Prices are updated more quickly, efficiently and more accurately than manual data entry.
Although this is a simple example, it serves as a powerful illustration of the different use cases that can determine a company’s best fit.
What are some important factors to weigh in considering a CWM or RPA solution?
It’s important to ensure you consider your own unique goals, pain points and processes when it comes to determining whether to explore a CWM or RPA solution for your company. In addition to fully exploring the unique potential and processes provided by both solutions, here are six questions I recommend organizations ask themselves.
1. What processes are you trying to improve?
2. How well are the processes documented or the rules defined?
3. What pain points are you trying to eliminate, and what do they cost you?
4. How much collaboration or human decision-making is required?
5. What is your existing IT infrastructure? How will the RPA or CWM fit in?
6. What is your budget and time frame for getting something done?
Answering these questions from a rough order of magnitude (ROM) perspective will position you more comfortably to compare your options and make an ultimate decision.
Is your company considering an RPA or CWM solution?
Researched effectively and implemented using the right strategies, an RPA or CWM solution can be a game-changing operational asset. I hope this article offers some valuable takeaways for leaders seeking to determine which solution might be best for them.
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