What is Robotic Process Automation?

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Andreas Obermair

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In this blog, Global Practice Lead Andreas Obermair take RPA back to basics to explore the benefits and use cases.

The term RPA was officially coined around 2012 but it really took off in the late 2010s as businesses in a variety of industries such as telecoms, banking, insurance, healthcare, automotive, and manufacturing began adopting RPA solutions. Roboyo’s founders saw the potential RPA had to revolutionize the efficiency of businesses processes, and with that, in 2015 Roboyo was founded. Today, RPA is being used across almost every industry and in a wide range of functions, including HR, Finance, Operations, Customer Service, and more.  

The Benefits of RPA  

There is a wide range of benefits of RPA, but the main draw are the cost reductions made possible by the increased efficiency of using software robots to carry out repeatable tasks at pace and at scale.  

A study by KPMG found that in the financial services industry using RPA can cut costs for organizations by up to 75% – a figure that we often see with our own customers. Those significant savings can be reinvested into the organization’s people, upskilling them to take on more involved and high-value tasks with the time saved by RPA.  

Deploying bots to undertake repeatable, process-driven tasks such as data entry and manipulation and executing transactions not only saves time on those processes, but it also frees up staff time for higher value, more strategic tasks. The result is more value for the business in terms of efficiency, productivity, and greater job satisfaction for employees.   

Think of RPA bots as extra team members who take on the essential but boring tasks that can lead to frustration and burnout, and leaving the more rewarding, innovative work to your talented people.  

RPA doesn’t just deliver financial and morale benefits – there are data quality benefits, too. Using bots leads to increased accuracy as manual errors are all but eliminated. By instilling trust in organizational data and enabling its reliability across various entities, such as during audits or compliance-related data aggregation, this capability empowers organizations to make informed decisions, confidently utilize and share data, and drive efficient decision-making processes. 

The Many Use Cases of RPA  

RPA enables teams across all kinds of business units to streamline processes and speed up data collection, verification, migration, and analysis. This allows teams to benefit from enhanced data accuracy and faster decision making.  

To give you a better understanding of how different departments deploy RPA, and the many RPA use cases, let’s take a look at a few examples.  

Finance:

Finance teams deal with highly-sensitive data – both financial and personal – and so data accuracy is paramount. RPA in finance can help with: 

• Data extraction from bank statements, data reconciliation, automatically notifying accountants of changes or issues 
• Balance sheet preparation  
• Risk forecasting  
• Payroll automation   

Human Resources  

HR is another field where data is extremely important, for example in people analytics (PA) programs. But HR teams use RPA for more than just data processing. Automation can help HR teams and leaders with: 

• New staff onboarding – RPA makes this more efficient by making onboarding quicker, saving time and money 
• Aggregating CVs, exam/assessment results, and interview notes 
• Data scraping from LinkedIn and other job sites to compare candidate data and job market data 
• Verifying employment history  

Customer Service 

While customer service is a human-centered field, robots can help here, too. Here’s how RPA helps customer service employees: 

• Deploying chatbots to direct customers to the right department or resources
• Processing customer requests and recording updates to cases 
• Gathering customer data while an agent focusses on the customer’s problem  
• Updating order/tracking information and sending email updates  

These are just a few of the teams that can use RPA to their advantage, and this is in no way an exhaustive list. We’d need more than a single blog to include the full extent of how RPA can be applied to different functions. Visit our RPA page to find out more. 

Three Components of RPA  

Deploying bots to undertake tasks for you while you work alongside them may sound quite futuristic and complex, but once you whittle it down to the key components, it’s a lot simpler than it seems.  

Workflow Automation  

Workflow automation is the key ingredient of RPA. It allows you to automate an entire workflow from beginning to end by setting rules for the robot to carry out each step autonomously and automatically.  

Integration Capabilities  

One of the key aspects that enables RPA to work seamlessly and efficiently is the integration capability at its core. Using RPA, you can create links between applications to allow the robot to carry out tasks that require two or more different applications or software solutions. You can also combine RPA and Intelligent Automation, which allows you to use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to fill in any gaps that RPA on its own can’t fill, for example when data is unstructured or simply missing. 

RPA Implementation  

Implementing RPA is the most involved component of the RPA journey, as once you’ve implemented it, the bots are ready to run on their own. Here’s a step-by-step checklist of how best to approach RPA implementation:  

• Identify the processes you want to automate 
• Assess and analyze how easy/feasible it is to automate these processes 
• Develop the bots 
• Utilize Test Automation to thoroughly test both the developed bots and the behavior of the targeted applications 
• Educate users to increase/enable easier adoption  
• Deploy the robots across the organization  
• Oversee and maintain the robots  

Conclusion 

There are many reasons for implementing RPA. From cost and efficiency benefits to staff satisfaction, there’s a lot to gain from RPA and allowing software robots to run essential but time-consuming, manual processes.  

Roboyo can help your organization implement an RPA program to save time and money and reduce risk of errors and inaccuracy. Contact us today to arrange an RPA consultation.  

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