Most of the organizations today are going through some form of digital automation to improve business processes, customer experience and operational efficiency. In recent years, the question what is RPA has become important since RPA as a technology has created significant excitement with success in many verticals across industries.
RPA has been at the forefront of every CIO’s agenda to accelerate their automation journey. However, many customers that we spoke to, while aware of RPA and wanted to explore its implementation in their organizations, they also had some fundamental questions such as what is it? why do we need RPA? and how does it work? Is RPA different from BPM? What use cases is it best suited for?
Read on if you are looking for simple answers to these questions.
Where did RPA come from?
We live in the work of insanely routine, mundane and repetitive tasks.
Take the example of Invoice Processing in any organization – armies of people reading emails, downloading supplier invoices attached to them, reading them, entering them into ERP systems, matching underlying receipts, maintaining them in Excel sheets for tracking, uploading those files into SharePoint, and more are common steps in invoice processing. Most of these activities hardly need human judgement, knowledge and experience. Except for approvals, majority of these tasks are very routine and mundane in nature. Following are the challenges with these tasks:
- Because of routine and mundane nature, boredom sets in for people executing such tasks day-in and day-out and results in lower productivity
- Large volume of these mundane activities leads to fatigue
- Human errors are inevitable primarily because of the nature of these activities
- Humans need breaks. They can only work 8 hours a day. This means the activities must wait and have longer cycle times
Robotic Process Automation came into being to address the above challenges. And since RPA is being widely used for invoice processing today, what is rpa has become an important question for businesses looking to implement RPA.
What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?
With Robotic Process Automation, you can easily automate such repetitive tasks in a given business process. Referring to the example of Invoice Processing, RPA can read emails, download and read PDF’s, maintain data in Excel sheets, update backend ERP systems, while approvals and quality checks remain manual as they need specialized skills, judgement and knowledge. This helps the business process in two ways:
- Execute the mundane tasks with greater efficiency
- Allow organizations to utilize the human work force for higher value, non-mundane tasks
How does it work?
RPA involves the use of software robots that are programed and trained to replicate human actions such as interacting with a software application via a user interface or through an API. Once trained, these bots perform simple tasks exactly like humans. For example, the bots can be trained to perform a search for the question what is rpa on any search engine!
In our Invoice processing example, this bot can be trained to perform all mundane tasks that are currently being performed by a human workforce. As opposed to integration technologies that may use Web Services and other Application Programing Interfaces (API) to enter data into systems, RPA bots perform the data entry exactly the way human would do – open the application, login, click on a menu/sub-menu, enter data into fields and submit.
All RPA tools provide out-of-the-box library of pre-trained activities that a bot can perform. RPA developers just need to drag-drop them in their process design and automate the tasks. RPA also provides recorders so that the bot can watch a human perform certain activity (e.g. entering data into a ERP system) and record it so that it can execute it when asked.
Features like these make RPA solution development extremely fast, as often there is no coding involved.
Key benefits
Some of the key benefits that can be derived include the following:
- Utilize humans workforce for activities that add value
- Increase process throughput
- Reduce errors
- Accelerate time to value: Create, test and deliver new automations in days or weeks.
- Decrease development costs: Develop automations quickly with simple record/playback functions
Use cases for RPA
While RPA has great potential, it is not a magic wand that can solve every automation problem under the sun. RPA makes sense in the following scenarios.
- Large number of repetitive tasks that do not need human judgement
- High volume of tasks
- Manual data entry into systems
- Multiple legacy applications that are not integrated and hence require swivel chair integration
- To automate similar tasks being performed by a large number of human workforce (FTEs or Full-time Employees)
If your processes are more knowledge driven, need a lot of human judgement, are ad-hoc in nature, RPA may not be the best option for you. However, if you have a large number of routine tasks in large volume that is burning your human workforce off, RPA may be the solution.
Next steps
Contact us to see if RPA makes sense for you.
