Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotization of processes is the emerging form of business process automation. Organizations have a huge opportunity to capitalize on the power of Robotic Process Automation and save costs as Robots’ total cost of ownership is low. This will allow them to gain competitive advantage and achieve higher levels of accuracy, productivity and efficiency.

Robotic Process Automation provides control to business users over the digital workforce making them more agile in achieving business targets. On the other hand, Robotic Desktop Automation brings the concept of virtual assistance into reality and allows front office users to give certain tasks to robots on demand. Companies need to adopt this technology early enough and start utilizing their workforce to focus on strategic activities rather than repetitive work that can be handled by robots. With time, RPA will have more cognitive capabilities to facilitate more complex processes that require intelligence in decision making.

RPA is a technology that mimics human actions on computers like typing, clicking, scrolling, copying & pasting, dragging & dropping etc. Essentially, anything that we do on a computer can be done by a software robot. On top of that, RPA solutions provide convenient and user friendly tools that can be operated by business users and that allow robots to get trained to perform business processes which don’t involve complex decision making. These trainings imply defining a sequence of steps for robots to follow to be able to perform certain tasks. In most of the cases, this will be relevant for the processes that involve users’ interaction with multiple applications and require transfer of information between those applications – because either direct integration is not possible (e.g. in case of legacy systems without modern integration capabilities) or it is too costly and time consuming. Typical examples include uploading data from enterprise LOB applications to governmental/3d party portals, automating payment reconciliation between bank statements and financial systems, uploading financial data to ERP systems, updating HR systems, automating onboarding or contract cancellation procedures that may require manipulations with multiple applications, collecting details from different systems for building a 360 view of customers or etc...

The same concept is applied for Robotic Desktop Automation. It allows automating various repetitive steps of call centers or front office employees for example and providing users control over the robots so these robots can be triggered on demand. This allows handling manipulations with sensitive data with higher levels of accuracy, completing tasks faster, and providing guidance for the users on the next action.

Robots can be easily integrated with other AI applications thus adding more intelligence into the robotic process. For example, a combination of RPA and data extraction tools with complex document processing scenarios can be fully automated. This includes invoice processing, KYC procedures, etc..

Challenges

• The increasing operational costs of running human intensive processes
• Scaling human intensive operations at the time of peak volumes
• Retaining talents and allowing them to focus on more value added tasks
• Maintaining the quality of data entry and data transfer between multiple applications
• Compliance with regulations
• Improvement of customer experience and reducing AHT (average handling time) per customers’ requests
• Ensuring business continuity around the clock
• Overcoming high costs and long timeframes of implementing direct integrations between separate systems

Benefits

Robotics drives efficiency benefits, along with improvements in quality, scalability and resilience in a cost effective way.

• High quality: Robotics virtual workforce improves the capacity of staff and refocuses their efforts into customer service and more value added tasks.
  • Elimination of human errors
  • Improved compliance/auditability
  • Increased satisfaction of employees
  • Full audit trail
• Increased productivity: Average handling time reduced by 40%, 24/7 operation of processes ensuring business continuity, instant responses and high quality of customer service.
• Cost Savings: Processing costs reduced by up to 80% with a payback of investment within 3 months.
• High implementation speed: Fast implementation of new processes with no integration required, reusable process elements, scale up instantly without time needed to train new resources.