The technology world never stands still and new technologies keep emerging at a rapid pace. Robotic process automation (RPA) is one such technology that is garnering love from organizations worldwide. The technology is not only beneficial to large organizations but has immense potential for enterprises of all sizes as well.
According to a survey conducted by Deloitte in the year 2018, around 53% of the organizations have already begun their RPA journey.
The great news is that this number is expected to rise from 53% to 72% in the next two years. This means that there are some obvious reasons why organizations are adopting RPA at a rapid pace. Some of the significant benefits that RPA implementation can bring include improved compliance, quality and productivity; along with reduced costs and greater flexibility.
However, knowing about the advantages of RPA is not enough. Therefore, what becomes eventually important is to identify how to use and implement RPA across various areas of your business, in order to reap these benefits. This is when companies begin to ponder on several factors before deciding the operations that they want to automate. For businesses that are planning to implement RPA can choose one or more key areas for transformation listed below:
Robotic Process Automation Consultation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the solution as it can be undoubtedly applied across multiple sectors to automate various processes and save tremendous time and efforts.
Accounts payable
Improving the accounts payable (AP) process has been one of the most frustrating tasks for companies for a long time. It involves a number of tedious and time-consuming routine processes that can be automated to free the staff of the same. RPA is capable of handling structured data as well as unstructured data that forms a major chunk of any AP process. By using optical character recognition (OCR) and other AI capabilities, complex AP processes like extracting data from invoices, validation and reconciling orders can be performed without any human intervention.
Contact center
The contact center is an area where robotic process automation solutions can prove to be tremendously useful by providing operational cost savings and a better customer experience. Repetitive tasks such as order entry, order updates, billing, shipping notifications, refunds and retrieving KYC information can be automated. This, in turn, helps to reduce service time and error rates along with reducing overheads and freeing up agents to do tasks that are more productive.
Customer data management
Customer data is one of the most important assets for any organization. It becomes the basis for all the sales, marketing and other key business-related decisions. To ace customer data management, RPA turns out to be a great option. This technology allows companies to centralize, manage, classify, optimize and recover customer data in a timely and efficient fashion.
Moreover, by automating their processes, businesses can ensure better management of regulatory compliance; improve data quality and maintain transparency. This results in better capitalization of the customer data collected by the company.
IT support
An IT support team is an indispensable part of every business today. However, a major part of their time is wasted in doing repetitive and mundane tasks. Utilizing virtual workforce, a variety of tasks such as service requests, password resetting, diagnostics, backup, update, recovery, validation and ticketing update can be automated. These virtual support agents can perform actions with better speed and accuracy. RPA, therefore, enables organizations to improve their IT support service, provide speedy resolutions and enjoy cost savings.
Payroll processing
Payroll processing is an area where timeliness, accuracy and error-free operations need to be ensured at every step. Sometimes due to work fatigue or lack of concentration, manual errors can creep in. However, by adopting RPA in payroll, companies can enjoy an improved quality of service, devoid of any errors along with significant cost reductions.
RPA in payroll processing makes data collection, data exchange and data validation easy that often takes a lot of time if performed manually. Therefore, key processes involved in payroll management like pay slip generation, contractual changes, deductions, benefits disbursal, and attendance records can be automated to achieve better ROI.
Recruiting process
RPA is turning out to be the new recruitment partner for businesses worldwide. It helps to improve the recruiting accuracy, save time, remove bias and make the entire process more efficient. RPA can automate the early stages of recruitment, such as candidate sourcing, resume screening, interview scheduling as well as answering common FAQs for candidates. This relieves recruiters from the tedious part of their job and provides time to focus on more meaningful aspects. Moreover, RPA can also be used to automate recruitment marketing campaigns that result in increased engagement.
The RPA market will reach $1.7 billion in 2019 and $2.9 billion in 2021 – Forrester
Get started with RPA
The best way to get started with RPA is to identify the initial area that you want to focus on. The above-discussed adoption areas will definitely make the selection easy for you. Some of the other factors that you must keep in mind include volume, variety and velocity. A more suitable process for RPA is the one that is high in volume, less diverse in nature and has a scope for speed improvement.
Do you want to get more information before embarking on the RPA journey? Our automation experts are here to help. They provide RPA consulting services and help in determining which processes of your business are well-suited for automation. At Softweb, our continuous aim is to help organizations in unlocking the true value of these transformative technologies and enjoy long-term benefits.
