Applications of Robotic Process Automation(RPA): The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The emerging technologies affect our lives in ways we live, work, and interface with each other, which indicates we are going farther down the road with the fourth industrial revolution. With this revolution comes Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many more innovations. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a productivity tool governed by business logic and structured inputs that allows a user to configure one or more scripts (also known as “bots”) to activate particular keystrokes in an automated fashion. Top robotic process automation companies help investors, consumers, regulators, and citizens to adopt and employ RPA technologies in daily life.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation is a technology, using specialized computer programs, known as software robots, to automate and standardize manual rules-based business processes and repetitive tasks between multiple systems, filling in automation gaps. Bots perform tedious, admin-driven tasks, such as logging in and out of applications, opening emails and attachments, manipulating data, triggering responses, or executing transactions at better speed and higher accuracy. This, in turn, frees people from doing a range of tedious work and lets them focus on more strategic and human business priorities.
Applications of Robotic Process Automation Across 8 Industries
With robotic process automation software, any company with plenty of people performing high-volume, highly transactional process functions can boost their capabilities and save time and money. According to Gartner, although RPA software can be found in all industries, the biggest adopters are insurance companies, banks, telecom, and utility companies.
Let us have a closer look at eight industries that have the potential to change the way they do business by adopting RPA.
- Insurance
The insurance sector has to deal with document-heavy workflows and lengthy, multi-step claims, which can be processed more accurately by adopting RPA. The majority of operations in this industry, such as policies issuing or renewal, claims processing, underwriting, or managing end-of-month reports require compilation and sorting of data from multiple sources. RPA is significantly transforming the insurance industry by automatically pulling information from documents and directing it to appropriate workstreams.
2. Government
The adoption of robotic process automation in the public sector saves government working hours, improves productivity, cuts down costs, and allows them to address citizens’ oscillating demands in a better way. As RPA software can be used across multiple legacy systems, it can provide enormous cost benefits. For the state government, utilizing RPA for back-office tasks saves money as well as time, increases accuracy, and allows state employees to focus more on citizens.
3. HR
Several HR operations can be simplified using RPA, including training and development, automatically validating new hire data, and entering data into different systems, employee relations, and HR generalist activities. RPA can automatically identify data discrepancies and help reduce error rates and onboarding processing costs while increasing onboarding processing speed. Human resources RPA accurately updates account and personal information across multiple systems to facilitate processing and maintains high regulatory compliance.
4. Healthcare
For healthcare services, RPA can resolve all concerns related to scheduling patient appointments, speed up account settlements, ensuring the accuracy of discharge guidelines, and even sending reminders to patients about prescription pick-ups and upcoming medical tests. It can also help improve the healthcare cycle and centralize and streamline different workflows. Around 30–40% of health insurance claims result in edits or exceptions that might lead to denials. Here, RPA can help identify issues, facilitate claims review, and quantify and categorize past denials.
5. Banking and Financial Services
RPA implementation proves to be instrumental in saving both time and cost as compared to traditional banking solutions for automating manual processes and catching suspicious banking transactions. RPA automation in customer onboarding helps in avoiding manual errors. With RPA, the otherwise burdensome account opening process becomes much quicker, straightforward, and accurate. Although the bank has automated tedious loan processing to a certain extent, RPA further accelerates it.
6. Manufacturing and Retail
The manufacturing sector is increasingly adopting robotic process automation to achieve automated efficiency in areas other than the production line and also to improve back-office processes. By using RPA in the manufacturing industry, one can optimize time-centric and repetitive routine processes, reduce cost by minimizing human errors and increase compliance, and boost agility in operations. In the retail sector, RPA helps with store planning and inventory management, demand-supply planning, marketing planning, product categorization, etc. RPA bot can send updates to customers to keep them in the loop. Moreover, it can be configured to address simple user queries and take feedback from the sales team.
7. Telecom
The smart digitization introduced through RPA in telecom can drive the potential for any telecom business. RPA in telecom encourages stress-free process executions, for repetitive tasks like billing, data entry, order fulfillment, and accounts and ticket management. By utilizing RPA in telecom, scalability, and higher ROI can be expected with nearly zero error rates. Other than helping with the image transformation of the traditional telecom practices, RPA also increases the efficiency of the system.
8. Utilities
Electricity, oil, gas, and water companies across the globe are embracing digitization in the form of robotic process automation. Utility companies can improve their accounting processes, optimize their operational outputs in the back office through data analysis, and streamline their joint ventures. Utility distribution is not up to the mark for customer services in the majority of developing countries. RPA can check electricity grids by logging into the related systems to detect problems that can further help engineers in decision making and save a utility player from human error, untimely planning of outages, and accidents during maintenance exercises.
Conclusion
Machines have now entered the domain which once belonged to humans only, owing to the fourth industrial revolution. A report by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company suggests that automation technologies might have an economic impact of between $5.2 and $6.7 trillion by 2025. RPA technologies have remarkably developed since they first emerged in the early 2000s. We cannot know precisely how RPA technologies will unfold in the upcoming years, but various industries utilizing them for enhancing and streamlining operations indicates that its future is promising.
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