Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a lucrative new technology, seemingly hailed as the vanguard of efficiency and productivity. The technology has recently skyrocketed in popularity and there is much talk of its potential to revolutionize business productivity. But why? What is RPA, and why is there so much talk of it’s potential?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a form of process automation that allows for the robotization of repetitive, rule-based tasks and processes. In Layman’s terms, it enables a person to have a ‘bot’ or software complete a task for them. The software is used to automate once grueling and tedious tasks such as data processing and data management. Nonetheless, what makes the technology so crucial is its ability to greatly reduce the time taken to complete previously burdensome tasks to less than a second without making a single error.
While RPA is revolutionary in its ability to create efficiency, there is one central drawback: its strict criteria for use. According to David Landreman, the CTO of Olive, there are four musts when using an RPA:
- The process must be rule-based.
- The process must be repeated at regular intervals, or have a pre-defined trigger.
- The process must have defined input and outputs.
- The task should have sufficient volume
This strict criteria for use drastically reduces the real life applications of RPA. So, how is RPA actually used? And, who uses it?
Companies utilizing RPA are Coca Cola, Google, CVS,and Best Buy, among many more. In Coca Cola’s case, the HR department was struggling to accurately and quickly format reports and check for errors, so they instituted an RPA to 50 of their 150 ‘automatable’ processes. This improved efficiency as it allowed for these reports to be completed 24 hours per day compared to the previous 8 hours a day – with no additional staff. Using an RPA also allowed Coca Cola’s employees to focus on higher value tasks than formatting reports. According to Coca Cola, this allowed them to improve their customer and employee experience.
Another company using RPA is the People’s United Bank. The company was previously wasting up to three weeks of work to merge just one customer’s online profile. So, they instituted RPA to automate the process. Now it takes only 24 hours to merge a profile, and an employee doesn’t have to oversee the process. The company also uses RPA to reduce the time taken to look for discrepancies in deposits, decreasing the time per deposit from 15 minutes to 8,000 deposits in 48 hours.
These two cases of RPA use are among thousands of possible RPA usages. Some others include returns processing, sales orders, storing customer information, processing refunds and many more.
RPA has already and will continue to transform business as we know it. The bustling technology has disrupted business across the board and led the way into an era of unparalleled efficiency and productivity. RPA can increase customer and employee experiences, reduce costs, save time, eliminate error, increase scalability and security and allow companies to allocate resources more effectively. Given these benefits, it is no surprise that the RPA industry is expected to grow more than 20 percent per year (CAGR), reaching a market of $6.2 billion by 2027. Currently, most major organizations automate around 14 percent of their processes and this number is only rising. According to analysis by leading RPA companies, RPA can automate upwards of 40 percent of business processes and with advancing technology, this number is only increasing.
Robotic Process Automation has grown dramatically these past few years. We can see now that RPA is more in demand than ever before, and it is forecasted to replace repetitive, mundane, time-consuming, manual digital tasks with software robots. It is a cutting edge technology that can assist with risk quantification and prioritization. This is an intelligent automation that prevents from creating critical mistakes and indeed, it helps businesses come up with wise solutions easily and quickly. Thank you for sharing this article.