A handy guide to RPA: Leverage automation to save costs, optimize productivity and improve employee experience

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation is a software technology that enables engineers to develop software robots, which can emulate human interactions with digital systems. These robots can comprehend what’s on a screen, complete the right keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and perform a host of other actions.

The best part? They can do it better and faster!

Applications of RPA

RPA bots quite literally form your own digital workforce: a legion under your command that can interact with any system or application. The soldiers in this digital army can copy-paste, scrape web data, make calculations, open and move files, parse emails, log into programs, connect to APIs, and extract unstructured data.

Since bots can adapt to any interface or workflow, there’s no need to change business systems, applications, or existing processes in order to automate.

Advantages offered by RPA

RPA can streamline workflows, which makes organizations more profitable, flexible, and responsive. It also frees up employees to focus on critical business tasks and enhances their satisfaction levels.

It is non-invasive and can be implemented at record speeds. Its particularly useful for automating workflows that involve legacy systems that lack APIs, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), and database access.

That being said, let’s explore the benefits of RPA for your business:

1. Cost Savings: The intuitive code-free interface allows anyone to quickly master bot creation and start driving ROI. An average employee can easily gain 40% of their time spent on manual digital administrative tasks.
2. Greater Accuracy: With RPA you can achieve 100% accuracy, zero reworks, and near-perfect compliance. In the accounting sector, RPA is driving faster order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes. Healthcare and life sciences industry is leveraging automation to ensure strict compliance.
3. Improved Resilience: RPA bots can seamlessly respond to demand spikes and ramp up quickly to match workload peaks.
4. Greater Productivity: RPA bots can step up employee productivity by accelerating workflows and executing processes independently. In document-intensive industries like financial services, insurance, and the public sector, RPA bots can handle form filling and claims processing quite effectively.
5. Enhanced customer experience: RPA bots help service agents interact with customers by doing all the system and data entry legwork. This translates to reduced call handling time and boosts customer satisfaction levels. Industries such as telecommunications and life sciences deploy bots to streamline customer inquiry handling and smoothly respond to spikes in call volumes.

How does RPA work?

The simplest RPA bots can be created by recording the clicks and keystrokes as a user interacts with an app. These basic recordings often serve as a template for building more robust bots that can adapt to changes in screen size, layout, or workflows.

Some RPA tools can also use these initial recordings to create hybrid RPA bots that start by simply recording an existing workflow and then dynamically generating workflow automation on the back end.

In more complex RPA implementations, process mining and task mining tools are used to automatically capture business process workflows.

Process mining can analyze the logs of ERP and CRM applications, for example, to automatically generate a map of common enterprise processes. Task mining tools use a locally running app with machine vision to capture a user’s interactions across multiple apps.

RPA tools can also be connected to AI modules that have capabilities like machine vision and natural language processing to drive intelligent process automation.

Limitations of RPA

RPA has a variety of pitfalls associated with it. More often than not, these problems severely limit its application:

• Scalability: Enterprises have struggled to scale RPA automation initiatives because, although RPA’s software bots are relatively easy to implement, they can be hard to govern and manage.
• Limited abilities: Although its name includes the words “process automation,” many critics have pointed out that RPA software tools automate tasks. More work is often required to stitch multiple tasks together into a process.
• Security: RPA bots sometimes need to access sensitive information to complete their tasks. If they are compromised, they pose an additional security risk to organizations.
• Unexpected failures: RPA failures can occur when applications change in ways that are not anticipated by developers.
• Privacy. Bots may be involved in working with personally identifiable information governed by privacy requirements. Teams need to ensure this data is processed in conformance with local data protection laws such as GDPR.

              To read more:Unlocking Potential of RPA in Logistics

In a nutshell

If you’re battling with high volume, rules-based and repetitive processes on a daily basis, it’s time to automate. Talk to our experts and deploy a custom RPA solution right away!