More and more businesses are turning to new emerging technologies to automate their processes and eliminate tedious tasks. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) frees business users to focus on higher-value work and devote less time to tiring, repetitive tasks.
Walmart, Deutsche Bank, AT&T. and Ernst & Young are among the many leading, worldwide enterprises that have adopted RPA.
Companies are turning to the Robotic Process Automation emerging technology because:
1. many of them still rely on legacy systems
2. a large number of knowledge workers still work with many applications at the same time, including some legacy systems.
According to Gartner, Robotic Process Automation is the fastest-growing type of software. They estimate that RPA grew 63% in 2018 to $846 million.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
According to Wikipedia, Robotic process automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) workers. In essence, RPA is a useful tool that uses screen scraping and other technologies to create specialized agents that can automate repetitive tasks. This technology allows anyone today to set a computer as an agent that emulates and integrates the actions of a human, interacting within a platform to perform a variety of repetitive tasks.
What are the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
- Increased productivity
Employees are the first to understand the benefits of RPA as it relieves them from non-value-added activities
- Cost Saving
RPA automates business processes, reducing costs, and increasing throughput.
- Better Accuracy
Since humans develop the RPA agents, they make zero mistakes.
- Total Control
Once the agents are programmed everything they do is monitored.
- Better Customer Satisfaction
Less human errors and increased speed of customer-facing processes can lead to an improvement in customer satisfaction.
RPA Common Applications
- Customer service: RPA can help organizations offer better customer service by automating contact center tasks, including the upload of scanned documents, getting detailed data, and resolving simple but customer issues.
- Accounting: Organizations can use RPA for general accounting, creating and delivering invoices instantly without human intervention.
- Financial services: Companies in the financial services industry can use RPA for foreign exchange payments, automating, or extracting data from bank statements.
- Healthcare: Hospitals and Pharmaceutical companies can use RPA for keeping and managing patient records,
- Human resources: HR departments can automate their onboarding and offboarding processes with RPA. Moreover, they can automate the payroll function too.
- Supply chain management: RPA can be used for procurement, automating orders, payment processes, and checking low-stock levels.
Tips for powerful robotic process automation (RPA):
1. Set expectations:
Before you decide to choose your RPA, identify your business needs and which business processes are repetitive and really need to be automated. You can achieve a successful outcome by setting realistic expectations and managing them well.
2. Consider the employees’ adoption:
The adoption of a new technology carries a great deal of risk, so your RPA project can sink if your workers are resistant to adoption. Training events can be an effective way to train your employees on Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
3. Choose the right software based on your needs.
Therefore, to choose an RPA software vendor, you need to understand your business needs and every RPA vendors’ functionality. Comidor BPM combined with Robotic Process Automation is the perfect tool to orchestrate and automate end-to-end business processes, merging human and system activities into a single process.
What is the future of RPA?
Εnterprises have already started to boost their automation projects by combining RPA with other cutting-edge technologies such as Machine Learning, OCR, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), automating demanding tasks that in the past required execution by a human. According to a Global Market Insights Inc. report, the RPA market is expected to reach $5 billion by 2024. Also, KeyBanc Capital Markets expect that the global RPA market will emerge as a $100 billion opportunity in 10 years.
