“RPA” is an acronym for “Robotic Process Automation,” a broad term that turns CIOs around the world crazy, and for good reasons.
It’s a practice that businesses integrate to automate and streamline their operations. These operations include automation of job sequences in ERPs, email suites in CRMs, bot deployment to run processes, etc.
It uses software to automate these processes to reduce costs, eliminate errors, and achieve more work without increasing the organization’s size.
The RPA Advantage
RPA is full of benefits. It is a form of business process automation that allows a company to define requirements that bots or “robots” would perform instead of humans.
In a workplace, RPA is ultimately about automating some of the most repetitive and time-consuming digitized tasks where humans do not add much value and tend to introduce errors.
Ultimately, the tasks are performed faster without mistakes; any outlier in the process is subject to human revision, investigation, and decision.
Some of the benefits often mentioned by RPA adopters are that it:
- Boosts productivity
- Improves efficiency
- Reduces costs
- Generates savings
- Improves employee productivity
- Increases consistency and compliance
- Eases data acquisition and analytics
- Improves customer experience
RPA enhances how work is performed and stimulates companies to re-design their end-to-end processes and pursue digital transformation.
How to Start?
The first step is to evaluate which processes and workflows are potential candidates for automation. There are some criteria that your team should consider to identify the areas where RPA can be helpful.
There are three main areas:
- Processes involving high data processing
- Highly rule-based processes
- Processes at regular intervals
Use this list of criteria to discuss RPA implementation with your team. Teams may identify processes and workflow candidates with opportunities to work smarter and faster and increase client satisfaction.
Once the candidates for digital transformation are identified, you have an opportunity to dig deeper into the processes and workflows with process mining projects.
Process mining is a technique that analyzes how a process performs based on its event log. It is a source of data, knowledge, and insights that considers each process step and variation to help redesign a process.
Your Takeaways
RPA is an element of smart automation that can instantly help organizations save money and improve daily outcomes.
However, the flexibility and adaptability of the workforce are essential factors that can make or break the outcome of your automation and digital transformation projects. If you need help with your digital transformation, contact our team.