Well, RPA or Robotic Process Automation , is basically that. In short, RPA automation is the use of computer software or ‘robots’ to handle repetitive, mundane, rule-based digital tasks. Sure this ‘robot’ can’t exercise for you or clean your house but it can definitely improve your efficiency at work by doing those boring repetitive tasks so that you can work on the more interesting and productive stuff.
Gartner states that RPA is the fastest-growing segment in the global enterprise software market. They estimate that 85% of large and very large organizations will implement an RPA in their workflows. RPA grew 63% in 2018 to $846 million and will have a total revenue of 1.5 Billion by the end of 2020.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Leslie Willcocks, Ph.D., a professor of technology, work, and globalization at the London School of Economics, in an interview with , described in layman terms what an RPA is:
“RPA is a type of software that mimics the activity of a human being in carrying out a task within a process. It can do repetitive stuff more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans, freeing them to do other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer.”
In more technical terms, Robotic Process Automation is a generic tool built using screen scraping and other technologies to create specialized robots that can automate clerical tasks. RPA is one of the most popular applications of Artificial Intelligence. If you are an enterprise with legacy systems, this is the way to automate your workflows.
Generally, RPA or the robot can do jobs such as retrieving customer profiles, support, and order information from multiple enterprise systems and applications.
Benefits of RPA
RPA automation is extremely fast to implement and its results can be measured even faster. Some of the top benefits of RPA across all business functions include:
1. Improved Business Results: Focusing employees on higher value-added activities will result in improved business metrics which could impact the top or bottom line. This is one of the biggest benefits of RPA. For example, the process of call center personnel cold calling customers with new offers could be automated and the same people could actually work as face-to-face salespeople. Face-to-face sales have higher conversion rates and add to your bottom line.
2.Reduced Risk: Enterprise Legacy System upgrades tend to go over budget and deliver below expectations. RPA automation projects are low risk, and non-invasive. They can run on your current legacy system without disturbing existing systems.
3. Reduction of Data Entry Errors and Other Manual Errors: Afterall, one of the greatest benefits of automation is that machines do not get distracted! When you have Robotic Process Automation up and running, you say goodbye to manual errors for good!
4. Faster Service: Back office tasks like manual form entry into systems or copying data between systems take a lot of time and these can slow down your business. Benefits of RPA is that bots work at lightning speed without break and 24/7. For example, after RPA automation, Piraeus Bank reduced loan application processes from 35 minutes to 5 minutes.
5. Increased Scope for Data Collection: Now that you have robots interacting with legacy systems, they uncover data that was previously labor-intensive to extract. This enables the analytics team to access more data and provide better analyses.
6. Reduced Workload: Automation is always a good thing. Automating reports is valuable for the analytics department, it allows them to focus on more end-to-end, custom analysis.
7. Increased Employee Satisfaction: It gets boring for anyone to spend all day copying data from one system to another. After implementing an RPA, employees will be able to work on tasks that make them feel more appreciated.
8. Reduced Workload for the IT Team: RPA implementation can be done without a tech background, so as business users automate their processes, IT will get less small automation requests, a huge benefit of RPA.
9. RPA can Minimise Human Contact with Sensitive Data: This will allow reducing any probability of fraud and compliance issues.
10. Audit: can be easily done in case issues arise.
Keep These Tasks For RPA Automation
Basically, RPA bots have the ability to interact with applications like a human user. Bots are capable of these tasks and much more:
- In some simple applications including:
- Opening emails and attachments
- Logging into applications
- Moving files and folders
- Integrating with enterprise tools by
- Connecting to system APIs
- Reading and writing to databases
- Augmenting your data by
- Data processing
- Following logical rules such as “if/then” rules
- Making calculations
- Extracting data from documents
- Inputting data to forms
- Extracting and reformatting data into reports or dashboards
- Merging data from multiple sources
- Copying and pasting data.
Bots can do these functions on virtualization solutions like Citrix or on the Windows environment.
RPA Implementation with Systango
Every complex process can be broken down into simple steps and an RPA implementation is no different. A lot of coordination and collaboration is needed while trying to achieve RPA automation . Systango starts by asking you to outline the following What and Why.
To understand better what are the processes that can be shifted to an Robotic Process Automation, the following steps can be taken:
1. Select impactful yet easy to automate processes
Systango tries to understand all of your business processes and helps you choose the most impactful ones for RPA implementation as these processes:
- Have an impact on both cost and revenues.
- Are High volume
- Have low fault tolerance
- Generally Error-prone
- Speed-sensitive
- Requiring irregular labor
- Distributed processes
In short, select processes that can be easily automated with RPA automation. Such processes tend to be:
- Rule-based
- Company-specific
- Not on the roadmap for new systems
2. We Help You Understand Value for Each Use Case
We at Systango like WorkFusion’s approach and aim to identify and prioritize processes for RPA automation.
3. Implement the solution
For us to deliver the best RPA automation for your business, the contribution from subject matter experts from your organization is important while we prepare the process map for each of the use cases. This is extremely important to ensure accuracy and correctness especially when well-documented processes are not maintained.
After the role of RPA bots in the process is clarified, RPA bots can be programmed. Now here we try and understand what’s more important to you- quicker deployment vs more flexibility so we can deliver the perfect solution for your needs.
4. Run a pilot:
Now we know which processes we are going to automate, we help you understand the process better by using a process mining tool.
- Configure the RPA bot
- Test RPA bot
- Run a live pilot
- Evaluate pilot results
5. Finally, it’s time to Go Live!
- We help you design the new, bot-driven process
- Clarify roles and responsibilities
- Analyzing the results is extremely important. You should be able to see results in as much as a month’s time.
Success Stories of RPA Implementation
Based on a survey by Deloitte, companies who invested in RPA automation and implemented it properly got their ROI in less than 12 months. They also found about 20% of full-time equivalent capacity provided by robots.
London School of Economics analyzed 16 case studies where they found that the return on investment for RPA ranged from 30% up to 200%, Willcocks told McKinsey.
Blue Prism helped automate 14 processes of a BPO, which led them to achieve ~30% cost saving and improved their service quality and accuracy. Isn’t that awesome!
Let RPA Automation Help Your Company Transition Into The Future
Robotic process automation can easily send your employee productivity soaring. It can help reduce costs and improve accuracy. Your team can actually work and spend time on things that matter rather than on the same boring monotonous work. So if you need help with understanding what RPA automation can do for your company, get in touch!
Originally published at https://systango.com on August 4, 2020.
