The business climate is ever changing. An enterprise needs to continuously evolve its product, sales, marketing, etc. process to grow and stay relevant
A typical enterprise uses multiple and disconnected IT systems to run its operations. With change in Business process, these IT systems are not changed frequently due to budget, timing, and implementation complexity issues. Hence, the business process does not map the technical process mapped in the IT system.
To overcome this technical and organization debt human workforce is hired to fill the gap between systems and processes. Example: A company made changes in Sales process such that a mandatory 50% advance is required to confirm the booking of its product. But this is not coded in the IT system yet. A human worker will have to manual check the Invoice and payment details and process the sales order only if 50% advance is made.
With Robotic automation, the company can deploy virtual workers who mimic human workers. In case of a change in process, a change in few lines of software code is always faster and cheaper than retraining hundreds of employees.
Here, are some reasons why Robotics Process Automation is advantageous
A human can work average 8 hours a day whereas robots can work 24hours without any tiredness.
The average productivity of human is 60% with few errors as compared to Robot's productivity which is 100% without any errors.
Robots handle multiple tasks very well compared to a human being
Putting Digital Labor to Work
Automation is the demand from most of the individuals if they are thrown a question at them “Whether or not would you be fine with those boring tasks off of your hands”. RPA enables Organizations to make use of these software robots to finish all these repetitive, time consuming work for improved customer satisfaction. In addition to that, employees can now look into much pressing matters than the same old boring tasks which could be automated. This also helps them ensure that they can develop their skills and experience for the betterment of the Organization.
So now that you’ve decided automation is a good idea, where do you start? What are the types of processes that can be automated? Here’s a categorized list of 30+ examples to get you started:
1. Website scraping |
11. Generating renewal premiums |
21. Underwriting processes |
2 . Customer Order Processing |
12. Client profile updates |
22. Policy administration and servicing |
3. Incoming Customer email query processing |
13. Forms processing |
23. Requests for overdraft protection |
4. Transferring data from one system to another |
14. Claims processing |
24. Underwriting processes |
5. Call center operations |
15. Payroll processing |
25. Policy administration and servicing |
6. Policy administration and servicing |
16. Requests for overdraft protection |
26. Exception processing |
7. Straight-through processing of customer orders |
17. Order updates |
27. Shipping notifications |
8. Customer complaints processing |
18. Data cleansing |
28. Fraudulent account closing |
9. Benefits administration |
19. W4 management |
29. Credit card applications< |
10. Member eligibility and billing |
20. Patient registration |
30. Dispute resolution |
Robotic Process Automation is well suited for processes that are clearly defined and well documented, repeatable without much changes and also if they are rules based. Based on criteria mentioned, it helps organizations across numerous industries automate the completion of a wide variety of tasks.
Planning
In this phase, you need to Identify processes which you want to automate. Following checklist will help you identify the correct process
Is the process manual & repetitive?
Is the process Rule-based?
Is the input data is in electronic format and is readable?
Can existing System be used as it is with no change?
Next, steps in planning phase are
Setup project team, finalize implementation timelines and approach.
Agree on solution design for performing RPA processes.
Identify logging mechanism that should be implemented to find issues with running bots.
Clear roadmap should be defined to scale up RPA implementation
Development
In this phase, you start developing the automation workflows as per agreed plan. Being wizard driven, the implementation is quick
Testing
In this phase, you run Testing cycles for in-scope automation to identify and correct defects
Support & Maintenance
Provide continuous support after going live and helps in immediate defect resolution. Follow general maintenance guidelines with roles and responsibilities with business and IT support teams.
1. Emulates Human Action:
Emulates human execution of the repetitive process using various application and systems.
2. Conduct high-volume repeated tasks:
Robotics process automation can easily simulate rekeying of data from one system to another. It performs tasks like data entry, copying, and pasting.
3. Perform Multiple Tasks:
Operates multiple and complex tasks across multiple systems. This helps to process transactions, manipulate data and send reports.
4. 'Virtual' system integration:
This automation system can transfer data between disparate and legacy systems by connecting them at the user interface level instead of developing new data infrastructure.
5. Automated report generation:
Automates the extraction of data to comes up with accurate, effective and timely reports.
6. Information validation and auditing:
Resolves and cross-verify data between different systems to validate and check information to provide compliance and auditing outputs.
7. Technical debt management:
Helps to reduce technical debt by reducing the gap between systems, preventing the introduction of custom implementations.
8. Product management:
It helps to bridge the gap between IT systems and related product management platforms by automated updating of both systems.
9. Quality Assurance:
It can be beneficial to QA processes which cover regression testing and automating customer use case scenarios.
10. Data migration:
Allows automated data migration through systems which is not possible using traditional mediums, like document, spreadsheets or other source data files.
11. Gap solutions:
Robotic automatic fills the gaps with process deficiencies. It includes may simple tasks as password resets, the system resets, etc.
12. Revenue forecasting:
Automatically updating financial statements to predict revenue forecasting.