RPA (Robotic Process Automation) - Make way for the next big thing
It has been a while since RPA has been in the market and is quite a flashy term.
So what is RPA?
RPA takes the robot out of the human. The average knowledge worker employed on a back-office process has many repetitive, routine and uninteresting tasks. RPA can mimic the activity of a human being in carrying out these tasks.
Then what about us?
It is going to free us from doing the less challenging and mundane tasks and we can focus on other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer. Sounds interesting... In addition, who would not like an extra pair of legs and arms when doing something really tiring and boring?
An enterprise can reap many more benefits from deploying RPA
- Process large amounts of data quickly and effortlessly 24/7/365
- No space for human error
- Reduce process costs and FTEs
- Processing times become more realistic and consistent
- Improved employee satisfaction
- Improve the overall quality, accuracy and efficiency of services
To achieve the above results - just apply the business rules once to the bots, sit back and enjoy!
RPA Use Cases
Thinking from an enterprise perspective, let us look at some of the use cases where RPA has helped industries succeed and become more efficient
- After a 45% automation of their audit process, a global consultancy firm was able to save 54,000 hours of work annually, and reach 85% accuracy improvement in their audit process
- South Africa’s largest privately owned insurance group, Hollard faced a volume of 1.5 million emails incoming on a yearly basis from its brokers. To handle each insurance claim, the content of these emails and their attachments had to be interpreted and resulted in backlogs. Automation eliminated Hollard’s backlog of cases and reduced transaction costs by 91%.Robots can deal with 98% of cases autonomously and process them 600%
- A leading European IT Managed Service provider was running a support service. Handling over 15,000 calls a month, and due to the complexity of the systems and processes, the average time for each such incident was almost 6 minutes. The automated solution was able to complete tasks in less than 50 seconds – that’s an 83% reduction in execution time and 1M $ saved annually
Apart from these use cases, RPA can be and has been used in almost all business processes like Customer Service & Support Desk, IT & Infrastructure support, Data Migration, Back office administration, HR processes and so on
Some of the major RPA players in the market are Pega, Automation Anywhere, Blueprism, Uipath, workfusion.
Future of RPA
About the future of RPA, as one of the early users of RPA tools, I used to refer RPA solutions (bots) as dumb, which does what they are told to but now they are becoming more intelligent and powered by AI. This means that RPA can take over many jobs that we think are not doable. Bots are becoming capable of doing more ‘human like’ tasks.
And as a side note to all the humans out there – Everything sounds interesting and positive but sometimes you may have to make way for these clever bots one day (who knows!). So let us embrace this disruptive technology as soon as we can.
Cheers!
PS: If you do not believe what bots can do, look at the video ‘humans need not apply’ in YouTube. (Disclaimer: don’t get disheartened)
