Why should you choose RPA to boost your business processes

For the last decade, IT-sector has presented to the world hundreds of unique innovative solutions for business, starting from basic CRM-systems and ending with complex Blockchain-systems. Every technology can be successfully applied, provided that management uses competent approach when choosing the suitable technology for business.

It is common knowledge,that one of the main reasons why enterprises hunt the newest technologies is the will to automate business processes at a fraction of the cost and time. Recently there has been a lot of talks and discussions about emerging RPA being the best modern solution for business automation. So in this article, we will take a closer look at what RPA is, what can it offer to diverse industries and how to integrate RPA carefully to get the most benefit.

WHAT IS RPA?

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a practice of using the “software robots” to emulate any repeatable business processes. Software robots, in this case, are sort of virtual assistants, that can be configured and adapted to process transactions, manipulate data, respond to different queries and many other human interactions within digital systems.

It doesn’t involve any actual physical robots, only software programs, that are easy enough even for a non-technical worker to build scenarios of any complexity level for the robots.

HOW RPA IS ANY DIFFERENT FROM OTHER TECHNOLOGIES?

Some people mistakenly claim that RPA is the same thing as Artificial Intelligence, other people confuse RPA with Machine Learning. Indeed, at first glance, these three technologies seem almost identical. And moreover, they’re all a part of a continuum known as IA (Intelligent Automation). However, let’s sort it out and distinguish the actual difference between RPA solutions, AI, and ML.

Whenever people speak about AI (Artificial Intelligence), they immediately think about fantastic movies, about human-like robots or flawless systems with its own mind, that works even better and faster than any human’s brain. Artificial Intelligence is intended to mimic the humans’ way of sensing things, make deductions and communicate. One doesn’t need to teach an AI-system, it is able to learn and “think” on its own, make conclusions based on its previous experience and thus improving the skills. However, modern AI-systems are narrowly focused and perform a small range of functions, so big systems with a wide range of possibilities are still nothing else but a fantasy.

ML (Machine Learning) is a subsection of AI, that studies methods of constructing algorithms capable of learning. So in order to make an ML-system work, developers need to “feed” it with an enormous amount of previously marked data that they need the system to be able to recognize. The system analyses this data and learns to determine whether an object or an item is the needed one or not, again and again. In a nutshell, ML works according to the method of comparison as well as trial and error method. Mostly Machine Learning is talked about in the context of big data and data mining.

So when it comes to Robotic Process Automation, we talk about distinct software programs, that can be used by specialists of any proficiency level. There are a lot of examples of RPA, which prove that it can perform any task once it is showed step-by-step to the robot, but multiple times faster and more efficient. They log into applications, move files and folders, copy and paste data, fill in forms, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, scrape browsers, and many other routine things. Integration of RPA serves as a personal assistant, thus reducing the time spent by specialists on routine tasks and enabling them to focus on more important and strategic things.

In brief, RPA performs and executes, ML learns and studies, AI thinks and reflects. And one more important difference of RPA implementation is that it has low technical barriers comparing to ML and AI, since, originally, it is a code-free technology and doesn’t require any programming skills.

USE CASES OF RPA IN BUSINESS

Opportunities of robotic process automation can bring instant value to many basic business processes such as:

• Data collection for reports and therefore reports creation;
• Data migration;
• Operating with accounts receivable and accounts payable;
• Generating automatic responses to emails;
• Automating processes in ERP-systems,

And many others. Let’s look closer at some industries and see how the technology can be integrated into them and what are the business benefits of RPA.

Banking

The main challenge in banking organizations is maximizing the efficiency and at the same time keeping the costs very low while delivering the highest security level. It is a well-known fact, that the banking industry involves a lot of labor-intensive tasks, that are perfect for being automated via using the benefits of RPA. Here are some examples of RPA in banking operations:

• Consumer loan processing. Traditionally this process involves a lot of manual work — mostly tedious copy-pasting of customer information from one system to another. It takes 20 minutes in general per customer, which means that one specialist can process no more than 20–24 loan requests per day. RPA can take on all the manual work involved in this business process (which is about 80% from all the work) and thus reduce the time needed to process one request from 20 minutes to 5 — that leads to processing up to 90–96 loan requests per day;
• Customer verification. Instead of copy-pasting information about customers to various government websites, RPA can do it for you in an instant and paste the needed information in all the websites at once, thus giving more time for the security specialists for such an important task as decision-making;
• Bank account opening requests. The same with loan processing — software robots are able to cut down on the time needed to copy information from account-opening requests to the banking system. RPA can then also be applied to account maintenance and account reconciliation.

Insurance

• Claims processing. This is a very time-consuming task, because of the number of documents and data involved, besides it is quite competitive. Powers of RPA can help a lot by automatically registering First Notifications of Loss (FNOL), alert the responsible loss adjusters and collect the necessary information for the claim processing from dozens of sources in order to form and give assignments to the specialists;
• Underwriting. On average the underwriting process lasts up to 3–4 weeks. RPA is able to make this process take up twice as less time, automatically and quickly providing precise data related to the applicant from both internal and external sites. For example, a life insurance company could use RPA to get relevant prescription and medical histories from Milliman IntelliScript. An auto insurer can gather DMV records or a CLUE report.

Manufacturing

• Warehouse management. Many processes within warehouse management can be automated using RPA bots: order processing and payments, email or SMS alerts, communication between the customers, procurement and inventory management processes, service reminders on warehouse equipment, service and road tax reminders, shipment scheduling and tracking.

Healthcare

• Membership Management. Healthcare industry involves dozens of manually performed membership management processes, that cause the increase of patients’ waiting time, which then leads to their discomfort and annoyance. Such processes include: setting up accounts, verifying eligibility, processing enrollments, managing benefits, billing and customer service. These are all RPA-friendly tasks, these processes can become a lot faster, which of course will become a reason for increasing the number of pleased patients.

As you can see, the main thing that unites all the use cases presented above is that all of them requires at least 50% of manual work, that can be cut down to zero when RPA is integrated into the existing information systems. Once it is done, the staff can then concentrate on more strategically significant tasks and thus enormously increasing the company’s productivity — this is the major value of RPA.

ADVANTAGES OF APPLYING RPA IN YOUR BUSINESS

RPA software bots are a very user-friendly and cost-effective tool, that offers a lot of possibilities to diverse industries. Business can benefit from integrating RPA in numerous ways:

• Increased precision. Humans make a lot of mistakes unintentionally every day when it comes to routine work, while bots are much less prone to any kinds of errors;
• Enhanced employee experience. Employees will have more time to invest their talents in more engaging and interesting work thanks to bots saving people from dozens of hours of unrelieved tasks;
• Low technical barriers. Even people that have little PC-experience can use the easiest drag and drop process designer to set up a bot, hands down;
• Increased capacity. This goal can be reached due to speeding business processes up to 60–70% with Robotic Process Automation;
• Total submission to instructions. Humans sometimes can disobey the corporate rules, or just forget about them. In the meantime software robots strictly follow the given rules and instructions, and provide auditable records of the work done;
• Trustworthiness. RPA software doesn’t get tired, overworked or distracted. They can work 24/7 without interruption;
• No need for additional development. Most technologies require extensive developer resources to integrate across numerous applications, while RPA involves no disruption to underlying systems. This is especially useful for legacy systems, where APIs may not be available, or when companies don’t have enough resources to develop a deep level of integration with existing corporate systems.

At the moment such globally known companies as Walmart, Deutsche Bank, AT&T, Vanguard, Ernst & Young, Walgreens, Anthem and American Express Global Business Travel already know how to benefit from RPA in their business processes.

However, before deciding to use RPA solutions in your business, there are some important things that need to be clarified:

• Not any process can be automated with RPA. Software bots are the best choice for monotonous mechanical tasks that don’t require complex analysis or deep thinking. So it’s important to distinguish and sort such processes before making a decision towards robotic automation;
• Potential to eliminate jobs. Forrester Research estimates that RPA software will threaten the livelihood of 230 million or more knowledge workers or approximately 9 percent of the global workforce;
• The need for constant control. As with any technology, there can appear unplanned roadblocks. An example: an employee at a Genpact client changed the company’s password policy but no one programmed the bots to adjust, resulting in lost data.

Robotic Process Automation is already becoming an irreplaceable tool for business process automation and business digitizing. RPA reduces costs and increases productivity. But industry executives need to be very accurate before choosing any information technology for their business. The keys to successful implementing RPA or any other technologic/software solutions are clarified and managed expectations as well as thoroughly considered business impacts.

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