Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software category that provides an easy-to-control ‘digital workforce’ of increasingly intelligent software robots that informs, augments, supports and assists people in the automation of rules-based procedures and tasks. Over 1000 forward-thinking, global organisations are positively transforming their workplace operations – driven by both human and digital workers working in tandem – and seamlessly interacting with and orchestrating existing and new applications. The benefits of RPA are manyfold.
Benefits of RPA – key drivers of adoption
This all sounds great, but with any transformational, fast-evolving, relatively new technology like RPA comes hype and confusion. Therefore, it’s important to understand what factors are currently fuelling RPA adoption in the real world.
RPA adoption is being driven not just by the promise of greater operational efficiencies, but by ever more sophisticated criteria too. Key drivers include value creation, productivity increases, improving the customer experience and generating new opportunities — not job losses — to getting more value from staff. Other key RPA imperatives now include higher quality operations, greater workforce agility and more actionable data for customer insights.
Industries that adhere to strict regulatory or compliance requirements are using RPA to improve execution too. For example, the banking and financial services sector lead in RPA adoption as they seek to automate processes already locked down by regulators. Efficiency, cost cutting and risk reduction drivers also make RPA a perfect solution for these organisations. Other sectors such as, telecoms and pharma, where organisations’ core business operations possess significant, manual-driven processes – are rapidly implementing RPA solutions as well.
RPA: we take a look at UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere
Benefits of RPA – six key outcomes
- Improved quality – by cutting manual intervention of detailed, repetitive, processes and delivering error-free results.
- Efficiency savings and increased productivity – by returning hours back to the business to be re-purposed on higher value initiatives.
- Greater operational agility and flexibility – by accelerating processing times and throughput – while increasing capacity to manage spikes of high transaction volumes.
- Improved customer service – by removing pain points, streamlining interactions and increasing response times.
- Happy, motivated, staff – by liberating staff to work on more intellectually challenging, fulfilling work.
- Greater value insights – by improved data analytics visibility that can be used to create business insights into processes for further enhancements.
Benefits of RPA — How it is helping five multinationals
A US payroll company is tasked with paying 39 million people worldwide and using digital workers has led to bottom line benefits and additional capacity. RPA is now helping enable its international service delivery strategy – to standardise, optimise, automate, and centralise key processes – at a speed and cost point much more advantageous than other technologies.
RPA plays a key role in a major UK utility company’s digital strategy – by helping them deliver great customer service. Using RPA delivers many benefits such as reducing process time from days to minutes. But the clearest measure of success is being voted number one in its industry for customer service.
A global beer manufacturer use RPA and AI to handle a change in accounting standards 90% electronically, without human involvement. This included over 25,000 operational contracts in 40 languages and 17 data fields. By better using process data, it is helping them reduce complexity, and improve revenue and compliance too.
A big four accounting firm uses digital workers to underpin a multi-location, centre of excellence dedicated to enabling automation within the organisation. This helps improve customer experience, quality of services and efficiency.
A UK-based, telecommunications services provider deploys over 160 digital workers to autonomously process up to 500,000 transactions each month. The digital workers also use knowledge & insight to port data, perform credit checks, generate IDs and update customer data. They then use collaboration skills to conduct order processing, reassign customers and engage in customer dispute resolution. The results include a 3 year ROI of up to 800%, $1,200,000 in net benefits and 80 percent reduction per year in calls from customers requesting status updates for service inquiries.
Final thoughts
RPA is helping to swiftly deliver greater efficiencies, opportunities and value for more shareholders, customers and employees. They are also experiencing unexpected returns too that include; discovering much better regulatory compliance, faster delivery of new products to market, enhanced customer service – as well as increased employee skills and satisfaction.
If you think what RPA is compelling now, it’s going to get even more exciting. We’re entering a new era of more collaborative technology innovation, enabled by ever greater, intelligent, business automation – ‘connected-RPA’. Connected-RPA will enable organisations to increasingly release the combined creativity of the digitally savvy business users who really understand their business, by giving them the ability to access and exploit leading-edge cloud, AI, cognitive and other capabilities – so they can innovate and swiftly develop new, compelling, offerings.
How to make connected-RPA a success
Organisations that achieve ongoing success with RPA are the ones that have thoroughly assessed its ability to successfully operate and scale in their environments. What they all understand is that ease of use, security, resilience, governance and scalability are the most vital RPA vendor selection criteria. For those organisations new to RPA, the key challenge going forward is seeing through the hype, so they opt for a true, connected-RPA foundation to ensure that all the promises and gains are achieved in the longer term.
Written by Bart Peluso, head of Product at Blue Prism
