Have you ever found yourself wishing that routine and repetitive tasks like extracting data and copy pasting from one system to another, could be efficiently automated? Let me tell you, you’re not alone. Studies show that over 83% IT decision makers believe that workflow automation is an essential step in their aim to achieve digital transformation. What’s great is that around 70-80% of rule-based processes can be automated and here’s where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can step in and make a profound impact. A fascinating and sustainable technology of the growing interest in digital transformation, RPA has enormous potential in revamping and adding value to the way businesses like yours function.

So, ‘What exactly is RPA and how can it help my business?’ you ask? I am going to offer you an answer through an overview of RPA in my blog today. Let’s dive right in!

What is RPA?

Meet a unique digital assistant – an RPA bot i.e., a software robot that can fully or partially automate a product as well as a service to perform high-volume, repetitive tasks.

• ‘Robotic’ refers to the software program that you can set up to work with computer systems and applications.
• ‘Process’ refers to the specific task(s) that you wish to get done.
• ‘Automation’ simply means making that work happen ‘on its own’.

This kind of automation (entailing an impressive concoction of computer vision, NLP, deep learning, among other technologies) allows knowledge workers to devote their focus to more thoughtful, creative, and strategic work.

Benefits of RPA technology for your business

• Better process efficiency, accuracy, and compliance – This one is quite apparent, I’m sure you’ll agree. Software bots assure a clicking speed that’s much faster than the average person’s and they assure 100% precision each time. The only condition? You need to train them properly! RPA can also make the compliance journey of your organization smooth.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction – What tests customers’ patience the most? You guessed it right-waiting time. Bots and chatbots can work 24/7, naturally keeping customers happy.
• Boost in data analytics – RPA equals easy access to operational analytics and real-time business insights. Want to create reader-friendly, graphical dashboards? RPA analytic tools are the way to go!
• Support for scalability opportunities – An army of robots can easily tackle a rise in workload. Besides, you could begin by automating a process in one section of your business, and then expand by designing RPA solutions for processes in additional business units.
• Rapid Return on Investment (ROI) – RPA is fairly reasonable and doesn’t call for changes to the systems you currently have. In a scenario where RPA is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), there aren’t any fixed tech costs. Plus, thanks to RPA, employees’ efforts can be targeted towards other work that does need human input, leading to stronger productivity and ROI.
• Improved communication and employee morale – RPA can be a huge help if your business is engaged in communication process enhancement. Once routine and monotonous tasks are taken up by bots, employee morale improves in leaps and bounds since RPA is a force multiplier.

How RPA works and its applications in the real world

The good news is, overall, RPA implementation is hassle-free. It’s powerful in the real sense as it has access to information through legacy systems via swift and simple front-end integrations. This basically allows it to mimic the actions that a human worker would do. Back-end connections to databases and enterprise web services facilitate automation, too.

Read on to get an idea about some industry implementations of RPA:

• Healthcare – As a smarter edition of conventional hospital software, RPA makes sure that healthcare professionals say goodbye to the feeling of being overburdened and have the time and data to make excellent patient care decisions.
• Retail – Since online sales in the US alone are estimated to double by 2023, reaching about 20 to 25% of the overall retail sector, the retail realm needs RPA to reorganize its business processes to handle difficulties like unreliable labour availability and slow growth.
• Banking and financial services – Several reputed banks use RPA solutions to automate tasks, such as inquiry processing, account creation, and anti-money laundering. Banks harness armies of bots to automate high-volume data entry procedures.
• Insurance – If you are in this field, you must be aware of the repetitive nature of many of its processes. For instance, RPA can be applied to policy management tasks and claims processing.
• Manufacturing – This industry was quick to welcome automation. Think invoice management, workflow management, report generation and supply chain planning. Add RPA to the mix, and you have greater agility and enhanced quality as well.

These industries are among the major ones adopting RPA; there are a lot of other industries that can benefit from RPA.

RPA and artificial intelligence

You may have heard people using RPA and AI as synonyms. But here’s the major difference – RPA is process-powered, and AI is powered by data! RPA bots are merely obedient mechanisms-they follow processes defined by an end user, whereas AI bots leverage machine learning to identify patterns in unstructured data.

The two technologies do complement each other and share a connection in the sense that AI can help RPA to automate tasks completely and manage more complex use cases. RPA helps AI insights to be executed promptly. Here’s a case study that illustrates a great use case of a robust AI mechanism.

In these unparalleled times, more and more companies are opting for RPA to create a healthy work environment and keep those smiles on their customers’ faces intact! I think, after reading all of this, you may have started creating a plan to involve RPA in ramping up your business workflow!

Taking a step into a brilliant domain fusing AI and RPA in a sense, do look through our interesting blog that’s actually a tantalising recipe you could treat your business to – it’s about hyper automation that takes RPA to the next level and matters more than ever now.

What’s more, RPA, when coupled with the alchemy of machine learning, turns into an even more potent concoction named intelligent automation. So, do watch this space for our upcoming blog about intelligent automation! In the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you have any comments or suggestions.