Adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has augmented especially during the pandemic which drove the need for faster & more accurate business process automation. Gartner predicts that 90% of large global firms will have to adopt Robotic Process Automation in some or the other form by 2022 and large organizations will triple the capacity of their current RPA portfolios through 2024.

“With automation becoming an integral component to build effective digital transformation strategies, RPA has emerged as the technology of choice across organizations to streamline business operations and reduce costs,” says Anand Veeramani, Head of RPA Practice, Happiest Minds.

“With the shared services and business process outsourcing industry maturing and enterprises demanding increased operational efficiency and higher transactional volumes at lower price points, service providers today are increasingly turning towards RPA to meet the varied requirements of customers,” he adds.

What makes Robotic Process Automation so appealing is the propensity & efficiency for producing positive business outcomes. Rather than replacing humans with bots, Robotic Process Automation automates high-volume, repetitive responsibilities such as copying, pasting, verifying & gathering data. This facilitates organizations to leverage the complete brainpower & focus of their employees. By enabling higher-level job functions, Robotic Process Automation helps in spurring innovation & ability to invigorate business is founded on the following three key capabilities.

Robotic Process Automation provides greater scalability

Robotic Process Automation renders enterprises the ability to adapt as required – not just in terms of the kinds of tasks, which can be automated but also proliferate the number of tasks needed for a particular business objective. Robotic Process Automation can automate any process or task that is rule-based and repeatable and can be defined.

To enable enterprises to scale Healthcare offers a textbook case study for Robotic Process Automation’s ability. In the first few weeks of lockdowns owing to the pandemic, the adoption of virtual care increased at a breakneck pace. At Kaiser Permanente, the Telehealth appointments jumped from eighteen to eighty percent of visits by the end of April 2020 while video requests from digital telemedicine providers increased drastically to more than fifteen thousand per during the period. At the same time, providers & health systems started to implement Robotic Process Automation for streamlining processes & innovating their ability to treat more patients. This also includes enabling self-triage to interpret biometric data right from medical wearables & inputting patient information into Electronic Health Records.

Moving forward, scaling healthcare to possess the capability for improving health outcomes, either virtually getting the doctor to the patient or decreasing the administrative burden on healthcare professionals, will heavily rely on Robotic Process Automation technology.

Robotic Process Automation augments the human capability

By augmenting the existing capabilities of employees, Robotic Process Automation enables more creativity and innovation in them. The activities which take up the bulk of employees’ time but require little brainpower are ideal for RPA transformation. These include repetitive tasks.

For instance, let us consider the telecom industry. One of the telecom giants renders an app, which delivers hundreds of offers & discounts from outside vendors to 2.5 million users every week, however, the company was struggling with a convoluted software update process. Further sharing the deals with the app management team led to updating a large spreadsheet which again resulted in errors & missing information. Hence, it only led to errors which in turn resulted in significant software update delays.

The telecom giant was able to leverage Robotic Process Automation for implementing robotic integrity checks, removing the time needed for the app team in order to uncover & fix errors, & freeing the team to brainstorm as well as design new methods of customer interaction within the app. Therefore, the employees are now more engaged & feel more fulfilled in their roles since they are able to use their skillsets on business needs that drive value.

In another instance, XLNC Technologies – an emerging consulting firm that provides specialized services related to RPA, ML, and AI, states that its team of experts from a wide range of industries collaborate with its RPA specialists in the process analysis & design to implement industry-specific RPA solutions. The team from XLNC Technologies goes to the clients’ sites for studying and streamlining the processes, developing a strategy & implement the solution. The company develops intelligent bots that can work collaborating with the client’s workforce & learn from human activities.

Robotic Process Automation helps in achieving impressive ROI

The good news about Robotic Process Automation is that it neither breaks the bank nor the systems that organizations already have in place. RPA automates actions at the user interface level or the Application Programming Interface level, & unlike system-to-system interactions which need integration at a deeper level, it does not demand changes to either applications or processes. Also, with few resources, IT teams can test and adapt RPA at scale without risking an organization’s current processes & platforms after having tested a POC for determining its feasibility. These cost savings help firms to invest in activities which drive innovation including increased Research & Development.

Return on Investments can be achieved even through minor changes. One of the major software organizations achieved an impressive return on investment by implementing Robotic Process Automation technology to streamline business process outsourcing. The firm built an RPA pipeline which had the capability to automate the complete lifecycle of invoice processes, which also included receipt of invoices, organization & folder structuring, and invoice reconciliation. This led to zero errors while producing unlimited invoices/hour, with an ultimate cost savings of over thirty percent.

Therefore, Robotic Process Automation not only provides the ability to reduce menial workloads but also fosters imagination, creativity & innovation. It makes an impact well beyond faster & more efficient business processes.

Another award-winning, boutique hyper-automation service provider that provides intelligent automation solutions & services to speed digitalization and scale the automation journey is WonderBotz.

“Today more than ever, businesses need help to eliminate monotony in their workplace. Restoring humanity in businesses is critical to organizational success and value creation,” says Vivek Goel, Country Head – India, WonderBotz.

“We are passionate to the core and are focused on delivering business outcomes to maximum value and ROI for our customers. We get into the nuts and bolts of their business process and provide them with the optimal automation solutions to rapidly scale up their digitalization journey,” he adds.

In a nutshell

RPA is a game-changer that helps organizations to accelerate the business process by eliminating repetitive tasks and automating tedious jobs. With the right implementation plan, enterprises will be able to enhance productivity at the same time reduce costs.