Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation: Is your organization ready for this tectonic shift?

In the current scenario of digital transformation landscape, Robotic Process Automation is becoming one of the most trending tools to solve most of the drawbacks of your business processes. RPA has its own advantages, accurate performance and productivity advantages will come to display when implemented to any specific use cases.

RPA’s key proposition is to ease the employees from performing tedious, highly repetitive, data-intensive tasks thereby freeing employees to perform more strategical and innovative work. RPA robots can be designed to some common user actions like sending emails, reading email attachments, accessing legacy applications, capturing data from screen, etc. These features help innovate the current business processes and acts as key contributors to the RPA Journey.

RPA provides the smartest and the fastest win in terms of time to produce over its DPA counterparts (i.e. BPM, Case Management, Business Rules Engine, etc.). While these other process automation tools have an important part to play, RPA is gradually becoming a prominent technology to start the DPA journey. With the evolution of RPA space, RPA with AI will also prove to be a significant game changer by reducing human error and driving efficiencies.

RPA always have a valuable contribution to the growing business of an organization. In a recent survey by Enterprise Irregulars: 58% of 136 surveyed enterprises indicated satisfaction in their RPA initiatives.

Consider some of the information they found:

• Cost cutting satisfaction was highest with the marketing and IT departments while lower with customer service and finance. In the beginning, satisfaction comes from being able to extend legacy solutions and automate manual tasks, whereas later dissatisfaction is caused by over-investment, resulting in an extreme reduction of the workforce.
• Delight in the business process is higher with procurement and IT service desks, while the lower business standard was realized with customer service and financial accounting. If IT processes and the acquisition of business products could be automated, enterprises found higher business value. In similarity, finance and customer service still found less value.

RPA selection criteria

To make sure if RPA is right for a business process automation journey. Here are a few selection procedures to consider.

Maturity of the process

The full benefits from the RPA platform when business processes are fully developed, should be able to determine which tasks/processes can be fully automated, which tasks require human intervention, and which tasks require both. But should also be able to define how exceptions are handled within a specific task/process

Developing a stronger security consideration

It is necessary to maintain a highly secure operation on RPA process and to make sure RPA vendors meet these requirements RPA bots are considered digital workers and should have the same, if not more, security considerations as a full-time employee (FTE)

Monitoring the robot’s performance

Once the robots are deployed, it’s necessary to ensure that these robots are performing as expected, RPA solution should give out of the box functionality to see how well the bots are performing

Controlling the bots

It is required to administrate the entire process of deploy, schedule, and maintain the organization’s robot workforce with ease. Implementing RPA solution in business processes will certainly provide this flexibility

Licensing RPA vendors

Cost of software robots are comparatively less than the FTE, but the organization must consider what type of licensing structure fits best for their business models either they should license by robots or by capacity

Conclusion

In a longer run, it’s obvious to predict that technology is the cure of all, the reality with RPA lies within process improvement. Employee reduction is something to think about in the long term, but tweaking processes to optimize the business in the short term should take center stage.

The customer is still considered the most important part of the business even if they are interacting with a robot. Organizations discovered a continued interest in chatbots and virtual agent solutions and considering how automation still has a way to go here, there is a lot of scope for innovation.

With these thoughts in mind, it’ll be interesting to see where the RPA market heads in the coming quarters.