Consultants should embrace RPA to grow their client impact
Robotic Process Automation, an increasingly popular technology, can reduce costs and boost productivity, accuracy, data analysis and decision-making. The Centre for Management Consulting Excellence recently ran an evening symposium focused on how robotics can help consultants improve their impact at clients.
The Centre for Management Consulting Excellence was founded in 2017 by the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants, a modern livery company based in the City of London in the UK. The Centre aims to identify and share the most important new ideas for management consultants, developing their performance to the benefit of their clients and the economy in general.
One of the key areas where the institution is currently recommending consultants can improve is in the implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Widely seen as a major enabler of organisational transformation, RPA denotes a process that utilises software programmed to autonomously carry out basic tasks across applications, reducing the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on employees.
According to the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence’s 2019 report into ‘Consulting Skills for 2030’, consulting skills in selling and delivering work will need to drastically change regarding robotics during the present decade. That prediction aligns with broader developments in the marketplace, as automation and artificial intelligence are also heavily touted to fundamentally change what ‘work’ means in the next few years.
Further reinforcing this, the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence recently ran an evening symposium focused on how robotics can help consultants to better serve the needs of their clients. The key message on the night for consulting firms was clear: start now to gain maximum benefit in what will be a $30 billion market.
The event was headlined by two RPA experts who led the symposium. Keith Stagner is CEO and Founder of T-Impact, which applies technologies to deliver rapid performance improvements, while Guy Kirkwood is Chief Evangelist for UiPath, a provider of RPA software and the fastest growing enterprise software company in history.
The duo chiefly directed their comments to management consultants, but the advice on offer should be of interest to many businesses in the wider world, as the ability of RPA to help consulting organisations deliver digital transformation to their customers is becoming ubiquitous. This is not confined to large practices; niche consulting companies have superb domain knowledge, which will really help scale RPA when working with their SME clients.
The experts also pointed out that RPA-as-a-service, based on the cloud, offers smaller consulting companies the opportunity to provide variable pricing models to their customers. This can help reduce risks and costs, and enable firms to grow their own businesses faster and more effectively.
Pointing to RPA implementation partners like T-Impact, Kirkwood and Stagner added that their value could not be over-stated, as the lessons that they have learned will shorten the time to value for both management consulting firms and their clients.
