IT is no secret that Malaysia needs to improve its economic productivity if it is to flourish in the years to come, with overall productivity declining by 3.60 percent in December 2017, according to recent studies.

From additional skills training to investments in technology, the government is pushing to address this challenge. However, one solution has emerged that is almost tailor-made for Malaysia: Robotics Process Automation (RPA).

Last year, Malaysia’s Prime Minister (PM) Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak launched the Malaysia Productivity Blueprint with a goal to boost annual labor productivity growth to 3.7 percent by 2020.

RPA can complement the PM’s initiativeby automating many of the repetitive, rules-based tasks that are currently carried out by employees in many of Malaysia’s largest companies- many of whom are younger graduates embarking on their careers.

Yet reading much of the opinion that has appeared in the local press, one could be forgiven for thinking RPA represents the end of the world, a dystopian future lurking around the corner, one of mass job losses, persistent unemployment, inequality, and robots overtaking our daily lives.

For an advanced country like Malaysia, with a significant number of white-collar workers, this view is understandable, but misplaced.

Why is RPA needed?

Firstly, I want to clarify some of the main reasons why many firms are turning to RPA to automate some of their most inefficient processes.

Much of the legacy IT infrastructure in many institutions that was built in the 80’s or 90’s, are now creaking under the weight of increased regulation, demand for transparency and growth of newer technology.

These systems are not only slow and very difficult to automate but they also run on outdated codes that few people understand anymore.

This brings about the need to hire staff to carry out tasks that should be completed by a computer, thus injecting human error into an industry.

In 2012, global financial giant JPMorgan Chase & Co lost US$6.2 billion in a trading incident that came to be known as the ‘London Whale’.

While subsequent reviews pointed to flaws in the bank’s oversight and review processes, a basic human error in an Excel spreadsheet led the bank to underestimate volatility, which in turn contributed to the debacle.

Like many other Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase & Co depended on Excel for their VaR (Value at Risk) model, mainly due to the fact that their own IT system was not able to do it itself.

Minus the capital and will to initiate wholesale upgrades to their IT infrastructure, financial institutions are forced to rely on humans to do the basic, repetitive tasks that should easily be automated.

This quite literally means an army of economics graduates copy and pasting data from a PDF, moving our mortgage applications from one folder to another folder, and shifting our credit card information between spreadsheets.

As well as creating huge costs and inefficiencies, which affect the quality of financial services we receive, the mundane, brainless nature of these tasks affect morale and turn highly capable graduates away from the industry.

I have used finance as an example, but this can be replicated across multiple different industries, from insurance and finance to telecoms and utilities.

RPA allows humans to be more human

As such, there are reasons for implementing RPA that go beyond cost savings and efficiency but a more compelling argument for RPA and automation in general is the greater value that it brings from human employees.

Malaysian graduates did not spend thousands of dollars and many years at universities and schools, to copy and paste data from one program to another.

Employees can focus on more valuable tasks

In fact, humans were simply not designed to do mundane, repetitive tasks as we tend to get bored easily and therefore are prone to errors.

We are blessed with creative thinking, innovation, intuition and problem-solving abilities among other skills and research has shown that jobs that incorporate some or all of these skills result in higher job satisfaction.

With RPA freeing employees from these repetitive tasks, companies can repurpose them to be much more value added.

Accountants will no longer be simply bean-counters, instead, they will need to acquire a much broader business outlook and, armed with better data, will become consultants who provide added value to clients, rather than just functionaries.

Higher-skilled employees

By starting their careers higher up the value chain, employees’ productivity will grow exponentially and this will have knock-on effects throughout the institutions that they have joined. Their skill levels will also be superior to their counterparts in other companies or countries who started their careers doing these boring, simple tasks.

Speedier, cheaper services

For larger banks, the ability to automate straightforward processes will speed up mortgage applications, improve business services and generally make finance more accessible to more people, as the cost of doing business is lower.

SMEs and start-ups, for example, will have access to cheaper financial services, allowing them to redirect investments towards hiring the talent that they need for innovation and growth.

One example is the financial arm of a major global vehicle manufacturer, who employed UiPath RPA solutions to create scalability, facilitate 24/7 operations, eliminate manual errors and enable humans to focus on more decision-oriented activities.

This was not about cost-savings but about providing better data and insights.

The company’s accounts-payable staff processed over 2,000 invoices a day but once RPA had been implemented, it was able to shave 65 percent to 75 percent off the time it took to process the same number of invoices.

The same staff was then redirected to spend more time analyzing and improving, instead of being dragged into the execution of day-to-day transactional activities.

Automation technologies such as RPA do not come without a certain amount of disruption and in the short term, there may be job losses. Yet, current practices of employing qualified people to do repetitive, tedious work is wasteful and expensive and there is a demand to leverage technology to improve productivity.

I am certain that any job losses will be much smaller than many envision and that the knock-on effect of higher productivity will result in many more jobs being created.

Malaysia is perfectly positioned to leverage the benefits RPA can bring to its economy. With a highly educated workforce and a need to improve productivity in order to survive, Malaysia could be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the next digital revolution.

By Raghunath Subramanian, President & CEO (India & APAC) of UiPath

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