Businesses have always been the first to harness the advances in technology to improve their efficiency and productivity. Already Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led enterprises to achieve not only an unprecedented degree of process automation but also a greater application of cognitive technologies to optimize future decision-making and predictions.
Lately, robotic process automation (RPA automation) has emerged as an automation technology that has greatly helped enterprises enhance their digital capabilities beyond their imagined limits. Widely regarded as a tool to revolutionize organizational environments, it is enabling businesses to streamline operations and minimize costs, paving the way for employees to engage in creative, and higher-value tasks.
Robotic process automation refers to a set of software applications or software robots that execute tasks like humans. It makes them an ideal solution for automating repetitive and manual operations that leaves no room for error. Software robots can be easily designed, developed, and deployed.
RPA automation tools can be employed to configure software, interpret applications for data manipulation, response triggering, transaction processing, and networking with other computerized frameworks. RPA solutions are being widely utilized by industries like healthcare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications.
Ways your business can take advantage of RPA:
1. Save time while minimizing costs
Implementing RPA automation can minimize the cost of labor by 35-65%. Along with a reduction in the workforce’s hiring cost, RPA robots can work round-the-clock without a break, allowing tasks to be completed much faster than before. Thus, productivity is optimized at half the previous cost.
2. Errorless processes and optimized resources
As humans, we are prone to committing mistakes during tasks of a repetitive nature. Businesses can overcome this by employing robotic process automation that eliminates errors resulting in faulty analytics and poor judgments. Hence, an organization can smoothen its workflow and optimize human resources by enabling its employees to focus on more important tasks than redundant ones.
3. RPA tools for automating responses and triggers
The planning capabilities of a robotic process automation system greatly helps managers in semi-automated and complete scheduling. RPA tools trigger and respond in the presence of a specific situation like a human action (e.g., a click) or a non-human action (e.g., email or document). Thus, possible areas requiring semi or complete automation through triggers can be discovered by businesses.
4. Scalable and flexible
RPA automation can be implemented in any software system. Since it does not require coding, so it can be flexibly adapted for any business. Its simultaneous cross-application working enables it to adapt to your distinct business workflows and processes. RPA solutions are scalable and can thus manage any increase in workload efficiently.
5. Better communication
RPA can execute vital communication processes through its intelligence. With appropriate triggers, RPA can modify single documents and effect those modifications throughout other documents. It frees employees from updating and editing files and enables end-users, representatives, and field workers to receive the current information.
6. Ensuring compliance
RPA automation appeals to enterprises as it automates redundant and time-consuming processes linked to regulatory compliance. It ensures that procedures and tasks follow mandatory protocols. Moreover, most RPA processes can be implemented over legacy systems without modifying underlying configurations to support its application.
Let’s see how the implementation of RPA automation helps enterprises achieve digital growth and advance at an unprecedented scale.
The Benefits of RPA Implementation
1. Healthcare
RPA solutions are used to effectively manage appointments and patient records, handling accounts, customer care, billing, analytics, and reporting.
2. Retail
RPA implementation enables updating orders, forwarding notifications, product shipping and tracking.
3. Telecommunications
RPA enables effective tracking and management of fraudulent data and upgradation of customer data.
4. Banking and insurance
RPA can be employed for processes of account openings and closings, supervising review demands, managing insurance claims, customer data and ensuring data accuracy and security.
5. Manufacturing
RPA tools aid in supply chain processes like billing of materials, customer support, reporting, data migration, managing stock levels, and shipment follow up.
6. Human resource management
RPA tools are used to execute HR tasks like assessing candidates, onboarding and offboarding, payroll administration, data management, and many more.
7. Customer support
RPA helps in customer service operations like managing requests, uploading scanned files, verifying signatures, providing customers with a self-service option, etc.
RPA and Conversational bots
Process automation is not new; RPA represents its subsequent advancement. Lately, the RPA approach seems to have been converging with Conversational AI technology, or Chatbots, as they are commonly known. It is essential to draw a line of distinction between the two. Conversational AI represents a more unstructured and fluid approach characterized by the timely execution of tasks where tasks and processes are prompted by user intent and conversations. Fixed and structured processes characterize RPA, on the other hand. Unlike chatbots, the application of RPA is intended for distinct processes, not requiring much user interaction. When the two are combined, the end result will be a more direct and process-oriented approach, rather than one dictated by an unstructured and dynamic conversational flow.
Conclusion
RPA automation has reshaped business processes. Apart from its automation capabilities, it also provides companies with valuable insights regarding their business patterns through data analytical capability. Through the RPA implementation, businesses all over are not only being able to focus better on their own operations, but they are also able to impart an enhanced customer experience. Robotic process automation is thus increasingly being seen as a means to progress through technical shortcomings and operational challenges, enabling businesses to step on the path towards a successful digital transformation.