Why Is RPA Important For Modern Business?

From automatic car washes to the most advanced auto assembly lines, automation has driven business and industry to hyper-efficient performance levels. Now, using digital robotics, automation promises to benefit businesses of all types and sizes.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the implementation of robotic software to complete everyday, repetitive tasks, such as open emails, transfer files, and send invoices. This frees human employees to focus on higher value work. The end results are streamlined business operations, improved accuracy, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

It’s a Robot That Operates Software & Apps

Companies have been using software for decades. Your employees read emails, download files, extract data, and fill out Excel spreadsheets. All of this is accomplished using specific software. RPA or ‘bots’ overlay these applications and do the busy work at a much faster rate.

RPA accelerates pre-existing process times. For example, a bot can:

1. Receive and read emails.
2. Download attachments, invoices, or files.
3. Extract data from flies/invoices and save the data to Excel.
4. Generate invoice reports or other documentation.
5. Send an email to confirm task completion.

Some estimate a 15x increase in work velocity when RPA technology is employed. Tasks such as transaction execution, data manipulation, response trigger, and inter-digital system communication can all be accomplished by RPA.

RPA Benefits: Speed, Accuracy & Cost Reduction

A recent study by Deloitte showed how a large investment bank re-engineered its claims process and deployed 85 bots to run 13 processes, totalling up to 1.5 million requests per year. The added capacity was equivalent to 200 full-time employees but at only 30 percent of the cost of adding more staff.

Meanwhile, the global analyst firm IDC, estimated that the cost of human error (in a firm with 100,000 employees) approaches $62.4 million per year. This means U.K. and U.S. enterprises lose a total of approximately $37 billion every year due to human error. Plus, damage to company reputation or customer trust can have even greater consequences. Some estimates state that RPA tools can reduce the burden of human error by 65% or more.

Improved Customer Experience

More advanced RPA and related technology, such as chatbots, natural language processing, machine learning solutions, and business intelligence elevate the potential of RPA even higher. For example, RPA can harvest and structure information from audio, text, and images. From there, the bots can identify patterns and deliver information to feed processes. The benefits can eventually extend all the way to the front office to create automated, high impact customer experiences.

What does this mean for the human work force? They are free to spend quality time on more nuanced, high value tasks, such as complex customer issues or creative, value adding projects. Meanwhile, customers are more satisfied as their needs are served quickly. However, if human interaction is needed, the service rep has time to respond adequately rather than being bogged down with busy work.

First Things First

The savvy business person will immediately notice something essential about RPA: it accelerates processes already in place. Many companies make the mistake of implementing RPA too early before taking a close look at their existing processes. This leads to frustration as an inherently flawed process won’t benefit from even the most advanced automation tools.

To extract the full power of RPA, it requires anticipatory process mining. Given that nearly all transactions leave a data footprint these days, process mining can identify operational trends, patterns, strengths, and weaknesses to obtain a clear picture of your business process health. Based on this data, improvements can be made. Then when RPA is layered in, your operations can achieve their true, maximum potential.

Interested in accelerating your business operations with RPA? Talk to one of our experts today.