How productive would your company employees be if they could save two hours a day on regular tasks?

With the growth and evolution of today’s digital economy, companies face the challenge of managing increasingly complex business processes that involve massive amounts of data. This has also led to repetitive work, like requiring employees to manually perform data-intensive tasks when there are technologies available that could help free their time and automate tasks.

According to a WorkMarket report, 53 percent of employees believe they could save up to two hours a day by automating tasks; that equates to roughly 20 hours a month. Working on tasks that could easily be automated is probably not the best use of employees’ time, especially if your business is trying to improve productivity or customer service.

How automation and RPA bots can help improve social welfare

Let’s look at Ana, who is a social worker focused on child welfare and is entrusted with the safety and well-being of children. Like most employees, Ana does whatever it takes to get the job done. Her dilemma is that she spends up to 80 percent of her time executing repetitive, administrative tasks, such as typing handwritten notes and forms into agency systems or manually requesting verifications or background checks from external systems. This leaves only around 20 percent for client-facing activities, which is too low to improve long-term client outcomes.

Can automation make an immediate impact on the well-being of our children and improve the efficiency of the child welfare workers charged with their safety? Simply put, the answer is yes.

Social workers can shift focus back on the important work they do with the help of proven automation technologies. By combining automation capabilities or services, such as automating tasks with robotic process automation (RPA) bots, extracting and classifying data from documents and automating decisions can make a significant and positive impact in the entire social services industry. Watch the below video to see how automation creates more time for child welfare workers to focus on helping vulnerable children by automating repetitive administrative work.

As you can see from the above video, Ana is able to offload a number of her repetitive, routine and administrative tasks to a bot, freeing her to spend more time and effort towards improving the lives of children. The intent of bots is to augment human worker roles for optimal work-effort outcomes, not replace them.

How hybrid workforce solutions help bring freedom

In the future of work, a hybrid workforce will emerge. In this hybrid workforce, bots will work seamlessly alongside human counterparts to get work done more efficiently and deliver exceptional experiences to both customers and employees. The hybrid workforce of the future will allow human employees to focus on inherent human strengths (for example, strategy, judgment, creativity and empathy).

We’ve been enabling IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, our automation software platform for digital business, to interoperate with more RPA solutions. This interoperability gives clients greater freedom of choice to execute according to their business objectives. Our newest collaboration is with Blue Prism, a market-leading RPA vendor.

While our customers are increasingly seeking RPA capabilities to complement digital transformation efforts, Blue Prism customers are building out capabilities to surround their RPA initiatives — including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing, intelligent document processing and business process management.

To enable greater interoperability between automation platforms, IBM and Blue Prism jointly developed API connectors, available on Blue Prism’s Digital Exchange (DX). These API connectors will help customers seamlessly integrate Blue Prism RPA task automation technology with three key IBM Digital Business Automation platform capabilities: Workflow, Data Capture and Decision Management.

This technical collaboration offers clients an automation solution for every style of work. This includes  immediately automating small-scale processes for efficiency and rapid return on investment (ROI), all the way to achieving a larger digital labor outcome through multiple types of automation.

Read the no-hype RPA Buyer’s Guide to learn how you can extend the value of your RPA investment by using an automation platform to establish new ways of working, maximize the expertise of your employees, lower operational costs and improve the experiences for our employees.