Software "robots" can easily be constructed using RPA technologies as part of an overall business process automation plan, including auto-responders or emails that launch thousands of bots preprogrammed to automate ERP duties. These 'bots' may trigger responses, modify data, or interface with digital systems providing immediate responses, modifications, or interactions among systems. Examples could include sending auto-replies via emails that use this approach or initiating them by sending emails out with predetermined actions that trigger responses via RPA technologies like an auto-reply email or sending emails preprogramming bots, all to automate ERP chores using this approach.
What Is RPA?
What is RPA? Robots have long been indispensable in manufacturing facilities and factories, increasing productivity while freeing employees to focus on more intricate duties. Now, thanks to RPA, businesses with staff handling high-volume business, IT support, or workflow procedures should see productivity increases similar to what other industries experience.
Two Kinds Of RPA: Attended And Unattended
As part of your evaluation of RPA as an automation solution for workflow automation, it's wise to carefully weigh both attended and unattended forms to find which option would best serve your company's needs.
Attended Automation
As part of its goal to increase high-value work across your company, automation can enable your staff to focus on higher-value activities more easily. It does so by automating repetitive, manual front office tasks as well as recording and replaying mouse clicks or other actions you take on a desktop or browser in real time.
Unattended Automation
Unattended automation does not need an operator at their computer; rather, autonomous bots record and replay actions. With triggers for automating events and trigger-based scheduling capabilities, unattended automation makes sense as a practical way of automating high-volume tasks in organizations of any size.
Features To Look For When Choosing RPA Software
Finding an RPA solution suitable to your business can be challenging, with numerous solutions. Finding an appropriate match should be the goal to ensure this decision aligns with other decisions within your organization, such as recruiting new talent. So, look for something suitable based on these considerations:
- Easy to use: Building and using bots should be accessible to all members of your organization. They should gather data that allows executives to make important business decisions quickly.
- Scalable: Select an RPA platform capable of accommodating as many locations as possible and being easily managed centrally.
- Reliable: As you will likely automate hundreds or even thousands of tasks, dependability and integrated analytics monitoring are important.
- Fast: Utilizing the right solution, you can rapidly optimize bots and design and test new robotic processes within hours.
- Smart: The best solutions provide access to any data source, facilitate basic task-based activities and leverage deep learning technologies for future automation.
Read more: Maximize Efficiency with RPA: How Much Time Can Your Business Save?
How To Select The Right Processes For Robotic Process Automation
RPA provides enterprises with an effective solution for eliminating mundane, repetitive work - freeing their personnel up to focus on higher-value deliverables while simultaneously speeding up processes more quickly, reliably, and with greater results than before. Robotic process automation (RPA) offers enterprises numerous advantages compared to manual processes: reduced monotonous repetitiveness, faster completion rates of menial activities with better outcomes, and, not least, time saved.
Not becoming too eager about automation can be hard when its benefits are apparent. However, getting carried away could have serious repercussions when trying to grow or assess return on investment (ROI). Only three percent of bot deployments reach scale globally, indicating large organizations still have difficulty scaling RPA despite numerous opportunities and candidates available for automation; choosing suitable operations to automate may contribute towards this issue as not all processes make good candidates for robotic process automation (RPA). Therefore, selecting appropriate processes as automated candidates is the first step toward expanding RPA.
Below are a series of methods designed to assist in selecting RPA use cases within your company and maximize scalability, speed to value creation and ROI.
Understand Processes
Understanding any process you intend to automate requires full comprehension - from its goals and stages to its integration within an overall business context.
Organizations can find great advantages in robotic process automation (RPA). Major businesses often make the mistake of rushing into RPA deployment with haste, automating operations that were problematic from the outset. Process automation rests upon its core tenet that only precisely defined, standardized, and well-delineated processes can be automated; most large firms lack such processes, even for something as basic as processing invoices, your company may handle it in different ways and automating each variation multiple times would only add complexity for scaling later on. Understanding your processes first will lead to their optimization, which then allows automation, the first step being standardization and optimization, which will enable optimization as this step makes scaling much simpler later down the line.
Define RPA Criteria
As part of any business process analysis, when considering automation candidates, you should ask yourself several key questions:
- Are these procedures routine and regularly carried out at least once weekly and sometimes daily?
- Are its processes mechanized and routine, with identical processes occurring each time the procedure takes place?
- Are the rules clear and set in stone?
- Are the activities being completed manually, subject to human error?
An automated procedure should fulfill each criterion on this list; nonetheless, additional research must be performed and additional questions asked of RPA software to ascertain its appropriateness for automation.
- Does an employee utilize apps to complete the task they were assigned digitally?
- Are the procedures subject to legal restrictions and limitations? (For instance, managing sensitive data via bots provides greater compliance without risk from human errors; this issue often arises for highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance and finance, which would greatly benefit from RPA).
- Does it involve physical work that doesn't necessitate much critical thought?
- Are all departments using one and the same standard procedure, or are there differing policies amongst themselves?
Though answering these questions might appear straightforward, their importance cannot be overstated, as answering them can determine which operations need automation while setting the foundation for future expansion and growth.
Define RPA Objectives.
RPA should bring benefits that satisfy everyone: making repetitive, monotonous jobs more reliable, efficient and high-quality so employees can focus on higher-value work while meeting corporate objectives and customer requirements. To reach these objectives, your goals must become more specific while asking some critical questions again:
- Do any procedures that are causing bottlenecks exist?
- Do any processes that are to be scaled require additional resources?
- Have operations suffered from error-prone data entry?
Build An Automation Framework.
Creating an evaluation methodology should become simple once your lower-scale goals and RPA criteria are clear. Each process that could benefit from automation should then be assessed accordingly. Validate any process that might qualify for automation by aligning its objectives and criteria with RPA objectives and criteria. A quick way is creating a checklist such as this one:
- Standard
- Common
- Repetitive and predictable
- Rule-based
- Currently manual and prone to human error
- Tied to regulatory constraints or enterprise standards
Give each item its weight; this will enable you to prioritize once it comes time for more intensive organization.
Understand Where Others Have Seen Success
72% of Fortune 1000 organizations will implement business process automation by year's end, so conducting a benchmark test to understand which industries and other large organizations have found value in process automation could be an excellent approach to finding optimal process automation solutions.
Data indicate that businesses are particularly drawn to this area:
- Human resources encompass payroll processing, employee onboarding and candidate screening as core HR management activities.
- Finance and accounting: Ensuring order entry or invoice data has been entered correctly into appropriate fields before compiling monthly and year-end reports.
- Customer management involves onboarding customers, web chat, ordering, quotas and delivery systems, and gathering data across systems. These elements all make up part of customer management.
- IT: password backups and resets.
- Financial and insurance services available through financial and insurance providers include data transfers for claims procedures, card management for misplaced or stolen cards, charge reversals, mortgage processing services and filing late payments again.
Realizing and scaling automation's value may seem challenging when its potential is so vast. Setting clear criteria, goals, and a success framework can make all the difference between an unsuccessful implementation attempt and one with scaleable goals that realize RPA's worth and returns available to it.
Conclusion
Organizations can find great advantages in robotic process automation (RPA). Organizations may experience greater accuracy, lower costs, increased productivity and better scalability through RPA. Applications of RPA include data entry, customer support, invoice processing, report production and HR procedures to name a few. Contact us as we are the best Robotic Process Automation Services Company.
