Have you ever heard of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? It is a software robotics that uses intelligent automation technology to carry out repetitive office functions of human employees. In other words, it is automation software that ends repetitive tasks and makes digital transformation come through.
Everybody can use Robotic Process Automation, because it is easy to use, especially in automating digital tasks. In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about Robotic Process Technology (RPA), including its meaning, the kinds of tasks it performs, its benefits, its relationship with AI, etc.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Also known as software robotics, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, use and manage software robots, which mimic human actions interacting with digital systems and software.
According to the director of product at Nintex, Aaron Bultman, RPA is a form of business process automation, which enables anyone to define a set of instructions for a robot/bot to perform. In other words, they can mimic several human-computer interactions to perform many error-free functions, at high-volume and pace.
RPA deploys automation technologies to emulate back-office functions of employees, including extraction of data, filling in forms, moving files, etc. It uses the combination of APIs and User Interface (UI) to integrate and carry out repetitive tasks between enterprise and productivity applications.
Just like humans, software robots can do things including understanding what’s on a screen, completing the right keystrokes, navigating systems, identifying and extracting data, and performing a series of specific actions. However, software robots can perform it faster and more consistently than humans, without stress or taking a coffee break.
Meanwhile, robotic process automation tools complete autonomous implementation of different activities and transactions across unrelated software systems. However, this action cannot be fulfilled without the use of scripts that mimic human processes. This technology also helps CIOs and other managers to fasten their digital transformation efforts and generate a higher return on investment (ROI) from their workers.
What Does Robotic Process Automation Do?
Robotic Process Automation can perform different tasks, especially in use cases and business processes. For instance, you can teach people outside of IT how RPA could save them much of the drudge stress of their daily jobs. Meanwhile, this task may prove more challenging when you want to explain to a field service technician how containerization will be beneficial to them.
Teaching people about RPA apart from IT should be a little easier than doing so for other topics that are more difficult to break down for non-technical people including server-less and microservices. A lot of firms and enterprises like this technology because of its crucial roles in helping them to improve productivity across a wide range of populations.
According to the CEO of Aisera, Muddu Sudhakar, these target populations may include users, customers, employees, sales and marketing people, business people, accountants, legal and finance analysts, etc. However, the light bulbs often turn on quicker with accessible instances of how technology can be deployed in the organization.
We can come back to data-intensive processes as a good beginning point, as Sudhakar has explained to us how wide ranges of activities can attend data, including receiving data, processing data, collecting data, correcting data, creating data, etc. You may also consider the repetitive processes in business tasks like finance, customer service, and HR.
Don’t forget about the amount of this sort of work in a sector such as finance. For instance, receivables and payables alone have traditionally needed lots of manual, repetitive effort by professional workers. Hence, you won’t be surprised to witness lofty predictions about RPA in particular business roles.
For instance, Gartner has foretold that by 2020, 73% of corporate managers will adopt some kind of RPA in their finance sectors, which is an increase from 2018. Again, other traditional business sectors including customer service and HR provide their own instances of data-intensive, rules-based, and repetitive processes.
Robotic process automation is also perfect in certain industries like insurance and financial services. Another expert by the name Anthony Edwards, the COO at Eggplant, has provided this certain use case as an example: Returns processing.
He said you should consider the last time you returned a purchase you made online, and what that means not just for you but also the organization from which you bought it. Those “free” returns are not really anything but Edwards said that traditionally, returns processing has been implemented manually and has been a costly endeavor.
According to Edwards, the RPA software can now deal with the return including a wide range of repetitive steps like sending a message to confirm receipt of the return and updating the inventory system. It may also include steps like making payment adjustments to the customer, ensuring that the internal billing processes are updated, etc.
According to Huff from Kofax, if you are a worker that can automate with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), you can switch your attention to more thoughtful and meaningful tasks. It will also eliminate data-entry errors, which can damage processing times, compliance, and complete customer experience.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Use Cases
A lot of industries in the digital world have increasingly used robotic process automation technology to streamline their business operations. You can find RPA uses across different industries including the following;
- Banking and financial services:
According to the Forrester report on “The RPA Services Market Will Grow to Reach USD 12 Billion By 2023”, 36% of all use cases were in the finance and accounting space. Over 1 in 3 bots today are in the financial industry, which is of little surprise given banking’s early adoption of automation.
Presently, most major banks leverage RPA automation solutions to automate work, like customer research, account opening, inquiry processing and anti-money laundering. A bank uses thousands of bots to automate manual high-volume data entry. These processes are concerned with a plethora of tedious, rule-based tasks that automation streamlines.
- Retail:
The rise of e-commerce has made RPA an essential part of the modern retail industry that has enhanced back office functions and the customer experience. Popular applications include customer relationship management, warehouse and order management, as well as customer feedback processing and fraud detection.
- Insurance:
Insurance has lots of repetitive processes that are well suited for automation. For instance, you are free to apply for RPA to claims processing operations, regulatory compliance, policy management, and underwriting tasks.
- Healthcare:
Accuracy and compliance are paramount in the healthcare industry. Some of the world’s largest hospitals use robotic process automation software to optimize information management, prescription management, insurance claim processing, and payment cycles, among other processes.
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Undoubtedly, there are lots of benefits that come with using robotic process automation in industries and organizations; some of which include the following;
- Less Coding: As long as RPA technology is concerned, it does not necessarily need a developer to configure; hence, drag-and-drop features in user interfaces make it easier to onboard non-technical staff.
- Rapid Cost Savings: Thanks to the reduction of the workload of teams by RPA, staff can be reallocated towards other priority work that does need human input; thereby resulting in the increase in productivity and ROI. In other words, RPA drives rapid, significant improvement to business metrics across industries and around the world.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction: Given that bots and chatbots can operate around the clock, they are capable of reducing wait times for customers, resulting in higher rates of customer satisfaction.
- Improvement of Employee Morale: It is another essential benefit of robotic process automation. Thanks to lifting repetitive, high-volume workload off your team, RPA gives people concentration on more thoughtful and strategic decision-making. This shift in work has a positive effect on employee happiness.
- Better accuracy and compliance: By programming RPA robots to follow specific workflows and rules, it will help to reduce human error, especially around job that needs accuracy and compliance, such as regulatory standards. RPA also offers an audit trail, which makes it easy to monitor progress and resolve issues more quickly.
- Existing systems remain in place: Another advantage of using robotic process automation software is that it does not result in any disruption to underlying systems since bots operate on the presentation layer of existing applications. Therefore, you can use bots in occasions where you don’t have an application programming interface (API) or the resources to develop deep integrations.
Challenges of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
You can’t deny the fact that robotic process automation is essential in today’s world, especially in helping an industry grow. However, almost everything that has advantages comes with challenges, including RPA. In other words, RPA technology comes with little difficulties including organizational culture, technical issues, and scaling.
- Organizational Culture
Like we’ve earlier discussed, robotic process automation will reduce the need for specific job functions, which will drive growth in new roles to deal with more complex jobs that enable workers to concentrate on higher-level strategy and creative problem-solving. However, it’ll require organizations to promote a culture of learning and innovation as roles within job roles shift.
In other words, a workforce will have to adapt, as it is crucial for successful outcomes in automation and digital transformation projects. There’s a need to educate your workers and invest in training programs to help prepare teams for potential shifts in priorities.
- Difficulty in Scaling
Robotic process automation can carry out many simultaneous tasks, but can be problematic to scale in an enterprise because of the regulatory updates or internal alterations. In Forrester’s report, 52% of customers claim they struggle with scaling their RPA program.
Therefore, a company needs to have over 100 active working robots to qualify as an advanced program. However, few RPA initiatives grow beyond the first 10 bots.
Key Relationship between RPA & Artificial Intelligence [AI]
Over the years, there have been some disagreements on the common relationship between Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) including some questioning if the former qualifies as the latter. The basis of this disagreement is that RPA doesn’t learn as it goes, specifically in a deep neural network.
For instance, if there’s any alteration in the automated task (e.g. if a field in a web form moves), the RPA bot typically can’t figure that out on its own. However, even with all these points in view, you can still find a strong relationship between RPA and AI, a growing one for that matter.
AI technologies that augment and emulate human judgment and action complement RPA technologies that replicate rules-based human actions. In other words, both technologies work together just as based workers work hand in glove as the engine to drive productivity for an organization.
According to Dave Costenaro, head of AI R&D at Jane.ai, as RPA becomes leveraged in concert with AI technologies, it acquires more abilities. Today’s booming AI technologies like deep neural networks are increasingly adding brand-new tools to the RPA toolbox mainly in vision and language tasks.
Presently, the RPA workflows can be enhanced by these recent improvements at decision nodes where they could not previously. Hence, allowing documents and images to be seen holistically by an algorithm, and interpreted for downstream logic and routing.
Conclusion
Understanding Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming increasingly important in today’s technology world. The Combination of RPA’s quantifiable value with its ease of implementation relative to other industry technology makes it one of the most used technologies in the world.
Thanks to RPA, industries can solve their specific operational issues in new and powerful ways. Managers of functional sectors including finance service, customer service, marketing unit, human resources, etc. have realized the improvements RPA has brought to many processes, yielding higher capacity, faster input, and fewer errors for key processes.