The next Industrial Revolution is here and is already taking the organisations across industries by storm! Yes, we are talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA along with Cognitive capabilities and Artificial Intelligence has brought in a new wave of digital transformation in the Technology space and the trend is showing a lot of promise as its ‘past’ statistics and ‘future’ predictions are full of merit and value.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Automation is nothing but a process to simplify and streamline our everyday tasks. Automation helps us save time and reduce the effort in our daily lives. Likewise, the process of automating everyday Business operations with the help of software bots is Robotic Process Automation. It enables organisations to automate the business processes that are repetitive, mundane and are normally high in volume, labour-intensive and time-consuming.

Technically speaking, the software bots capture the human actions to complete a computer-based process and perform that repetitively, as many times as required without any human interventions ensuring 100% accuracy.

Additionally, it is built for processes rather than tasks, meaning it can perform a complete end to end process comprising of a variety of tasks across distinct digital landscapes in Enterprises.

Studies show that, by leveraging RPA, Enterprises were able to reduce human effort by up to 90%, save costs by 70% and thereby, utilize the available resources for innovation and greater success.

How is RPA relevant to today’s technology landscape?

Today’s digital landscape is more complex and has varied systems in the line of a business process. They range from a legacy system to 3rd party CRM/ERP applications to cloud-deployed applications to Citrix/Microsoft platforms. As a result, integrating all of them is quintessential if any technology wants to perform the edge to edge process.

RPA does exactly that – it can access systems across channels, applications deployed in multi-cloud environments and navigate through 3rd party systems effortlessly in order to complete the process – all without any human intervention.

But the advantages don’t stop there. RPA can perform really complex tasks involving software code, unlike the traditional process automation. RPA also brings along the power of faster implementation (quick & easy to deploy) and scalability to process automation.

By deploying Software Bots otherwise known as a Virtual Workforce, organizations can embrace a future-proof technology that enables greater productivity and innovation.

Let’s identify Business cases for RPA

Can RPA be used to automate any business process in an organisation? The answer is No. RPA does have a limitation in terms of the type of process that can be automated. Any business process that can be defined by rules and engaged in structured data can easily be automated.

Having said that, RPA vendors based on the one you select for your operations would be able to provide an alternative solution to deal with unstructured data but only to some extent.

Hence, choosing the right process to automate is super important and also the first step in RPA implementation.

Moving on, let us see how to identify the best-case scenario to automate.

• Any routine process that is high in volume and requires enhanced productivity
• The daily operations that are carried out by a bunch of skilled resources who find it boring and exhausting.
• RPA can be applied to requirements of any duration – short, medium or long.
• Any digital process that can be performed without human manual intervention.

As long as the human judgement is not required to make decisions on a certain part of the process, it is a perfect material for automation. (Cognitive automation does address this to some extent, but we’ll see that later)

Few sample RPA Use Cases for better understanding

RPA is being widely used to automate processes like bookkeeping, data validation, report creation etc. across industries. Let’s find out the scenarios with more relevancy based on the sectors.

The list goes on in other industries too and as you can see, the possibilities are boundless when it comes to business process automation.

How you can get your business ready for the Next Technological Revolution?

First and foremost, businesses need to assess what processes to automate, how long does it take to automate and what result we can achieve through that. Thankfully, most of the RPA sellers are happy to provide a POC (Proof of Concept) to make realize the benefits of automating a certain process. So, take advantage of them to see if a particular platform works out for you and benefits are easy to achieve.

The possibilities, as mentioned before, are endless here and it allows the organizations to achieve further greatness whilst staying Futuristic!

Would you like to know more on how to go about RPA for your business?! Thinkweaver works with market-leading Automation Anywhere, UIPath and BluePrism platforms and we would be able to advise you on the right approach to adopt in the right platform for your requirement.

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