How European Companies are Using Automation to Transform Their Business — Europe in the Age of Automation

Mitev Natasha
Nov 6 · 4 min read

According to UiPath, automation technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will have a potential economic impact of nearly $6.7 trillion by 2025. This is because this market is expected to have the largest economic impact of the technologies after mobile internet for tablets and smartphones.

RPA is one of the most revolutionary enterprises introduced in the past two decades. Robotic Process Automation Technology, sometimes called a software bot, is the implementation of automatic routine business practices with software robots that perform tasks automatically, such as queries, calculations and maintains of recordings and transactions. This type of technology actually mimics human workers — logging into applications, entering data, calculating, completing tasks and logging out.

This software, however, is not a part of an organization’s IT infrastructure. Instead, it is placed on top of it, enabling a company to implement the technology quickly and efficiently, all that without changing the already existing infrastructure and systems.

Although the term “Robotic Process Automation” can be traced to the early 2000s, it has been around for a number of years previously. It evolved from three key technologies: screen scraping, then Workflow Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The new way of automation and technologies bring further opportunities for users, businesses and the economy not only in the United States and China but in Europe as well.

Europe in the Age of Automation

Automation is a new wave to the business infrastructure in Europe and it is expected to help the businesses in the region grow. RPA is already transforming the business process in Europe and had led to higher activity with better profit margins in the last few years.

According to Medium, The Europe Robotic Process Automation Market Revenue will register the Compound Annual Growth Rate of more than 25% to create revenue opportunities for key vendors. This means that the advanced use of RPA technology will double in Europe by the year 2020. This is because the companies are looking to improve customer experience and streamline their finance operations.

The research made by Information Services Group (ISG) reveals that 92% of people anticipate using RPA by 2020 and 54% state they will reach the advanced stage adoption by then.

ISG’s research showed RPA budgets in Europe increased on average by 9% in the last year, which is more than the average increase for the general IT spending. Out of that 9 %, 25% of the companies saw a double-digit increase.

“RPA is delivering improved outcomes for enterprises across Europe and our research shows many more businesses will be taking advantage of the technology by 2020 as adoption accelerates” — states the partner of ISG, Andreas Lueth, in the interview for PRNewswire.

James Dening, the vice president of Automation Anywhere in Europe, said that if implemented properly, over the next few years Robotic Process Automation technologies will help deliver value for businesses in Europe.

How does RPA transform the business?

RPA is widely used in business process management. Some of the top application include:

Customer service

Because of its ability to perform tasks automatically, this type of software helps companies offer better customer service automating contact center tasks, such as uploading scanned documents and verifying e-signatures.

Financial services

Companies in the financial service industry use RPA for foreign exchange payments, managing audit requests, and processing insurance claims, as well as automating account openings and closings. Robotic Process Automation is also used by the accountants. They use it for general accounting, operational accounting, transactional reporting, and budgeting.

Healthcare

RPA is used in hospitals to handle patient records, claims, customer support, billing or reporting.

Human Resources

This type of automation is used by the HR department to automate HR tasks, including onboarding and offboarding, updating employee information and timesheet submission processes.

We can see that RPA software is used all around the world in every business sector. It is particularly useful for organizations that have many different and complicated systems that need to interact together fluidly.

For instance, if an electronic form from a human resource system is missing zip code, an employee would handle the exception by looking up the correct zip code and entering it on the form. Once the form is complete, the employee might send it on to payroll so the information can be entered into the organization’s payroll system.

The best part about RPA technology, however, is that the software that has the ability to adapt, self-learn and self-correct would handle the exception and interact with the payroll system without human assistance.

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