Various industry sectors are leveraging Robotics Process Automation in their business processes to automate the mundane and routine tasks. Even though the technology is fairly new, the technology can significantly improve the overall productivity in the workplace and make the process lifecycle flawless.
The RPA leaders and visionaries, such as IBM, Appian, and Pega are not only deploying RPA solutions in the process lifecycle just for the sake of cost reduction but to make the operations agile and sleek to fortify market position. And, overall making operations effective, boost speed, and flourish the financial performance.
Major Industries Inducing RPA
Source: Protiviti
Major Business Areas Where RPA Can Be Leveraged
“RPA has a well-defined sweet spot: automating specific tasks for organizations that are stuck with legacy software that doesn’t offer an API.” — Jakob Freund
Most of the organizations are suffering from legacy system dysfunction. For instance, processing a simple order can take a few days as there is so much manual work involved from retrieving data from a system and then feeding it to the other system. This way, the customer does have a positive experience, and enterprises still spend humongous amounts on resources in order to accomplish customer satisfaction.
1. Customer Service
RPA is ideal for perfecting tasks that are manual, repetitive, time-consuming, are rule-based, carry low-risk, are data intensive, and are clearly defined at every step of a business operation.
Robotic Process Automation provides tactical and short term fixes. There are two kinds of bots – Attended bots and unattended bots.
Attended bots target the front office, and they are invoked by the agents in the life cycle. The unattended bots are the ones who autonomously execute the scheduled tasks assigned from the back office.
These automation bots will help in creating bandwidth for the humane agents to focus on customer relationships. RPA allows agents to offload their repetitive tasks and focus on creative and skillful tasks while nurturing customer relationships.
2. Data Extraction
RPA solutions have the capability to bridge the gap between database and its extraction. Be it high volume of data or a complex database either by scrapping or manipulating the present data. The automation bots have the power to extract, handle, and even utilize the data be it on a premise or on the cloud. RPA software integration can help you extract data from CSV, web browsers, Microsoft Excel, databases, and Microsoft Exchange or Gmail.
3. Accounts Payable Automation
Account payable process is critical to handle because of all the efforts in the process required. These processes are repetitive, time-consuming, and require a high level of engagement from resources. But according to a recent research by Basware and MasterCard – 20% of companies use automation software internally to alleviate their accounts payable headaches.
So, including automation can be beneficial in terms of –
a) Detecting errors: the most time consuming task is error reconciliation. The Account Payable staff puts up a large amount of time in manually matching, robots can reduce the amount of oversight and exception handling that this required by employees.
b) High Scalability: RPA can be reused across different business departments, meaning that quick scalability can be easily achieved.
c) Quick account closure: RPA software can be used to automate data input, error reconciliation, and some of the decision-making required by a company’s finance staff.
4. Human Resources Automation
“We’ve taken RPA and trained it on how employees do those tasks,” said Thompson, at the 2018 Forbes CIO Summit. “The list of things we could automate is getting longer and longer.”
HR involves a lot of tasks from recruiting, training, and also ensuring that they know their KRA in the organization. But for this HR professionals need to spend days and days in hiring them, training them, and also making them understand the company policies. Through a RPA solution, an organization can automate a lot of these processes to streamline and fast pace onboarding, offboarding, or also work on account management. RPA bots scrape data from online and automatically extract the relevant data, and then integrate the workflow with it. Freeing the HR team to do what they do best—work along with their people.
“One of the most significant benefits of RPA is freeing up capacity of staff in the organization so that they can focus on value added activities. However, these benefits can be difficult to quantify given the challenge in anticipating what people will achieve if they have more time. As a result, such benefits are often not captured or associated with RPA investments. Organizations should take this into account as they assess the value RPA is delivering for the organization.” – Jonathan Wyatt, Managing Director, Global Head of Protiviti Digital
All in all as RPA flourishes in your organization, with time you will see significant changes in terms of –
Source: Protiviti
So, How To Build A Comprehensive RPA Technology Plan For Your Organization
In order to build and implement correct RPA solutions, organizations must keep in mind –
1) An organization must develop scalable RPA solutions that can be rolled out across the entire business processes.
2) Ensure that the processes are standardized, digitized, and secured.
3) Key functions and business units must prior identify opportunities to assess performances.
4) If certain processes are already automated, then ensure those particular processes are fully optimized.
5) Ensure that your organization is using the correct tools for the process within the enterprise.
6) Organizations must be prepared to keep upgrading their integrated technologies.
7) Identify and address cyber security and risks that might hamper the performance of the processes.
8) Plan budgetary for ongoing maintenance
9) Analyze and monitor the cost-effectiveness of each RPA application.
Organizations can consider the above points to reduce the risks of wrong RPA deployment. However, with the development and integration of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, IoT, and computer vision, Robotics Process Automation can transform into an advanced technology called cognitive automation.
Cognitive automation or Intelligent Automation is capable of handling multiple complex business processes and learning from collected data, making the complicated process into smart processes.