What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and its 8 Benefits

What is Robotic Process Automation?. It is time for humans to do more valuable work and use robots to do various tedious administrative tasks.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) can help companies make their business more profitable, flexible, and responsive.

Robotic Process Automation Definition

RPA is a “robotic” software capable of imitating human activity on a computer. But with speed and accuracy of up to one hundred percent.

An RPA bot can login to an application or system, enter data, calculate and complete tasks, then it will log out of the application.

Today, practitioners divide RPA technology into three broad categories: probots, knowbots, and chatbots. Probots process data by following simple and iterative rules.

While knowbots are in charge of browsing the internet to collect and store specific information about users. Chatbots are virtual agents that can respond to customer requests in real time.

The term “robotic process automation” itself began to sound in the early 2000s. But actually, RPA had started to develop a few years earlier.

RPA is arguably an evolution of three main technologies: screen scraping, workflow automation, and artificial intelligence.

Screen scraping is the process of collecting screen display data from legacy applications so that the data can be display by a more modern user interface.

Meanwhile, workflow automation software eliminates manual data entry processes so as to increase speed, efficiency, and accuracy.

While artificial intelligence is an artificial intelligence system that is able to carry out tasks that generally require human intervention and intelligence.

How Does Robotic Process Automation Work?

Users just need to show the bot what to do, then let the bot do the work. RPA bots can interact with any application or system in the same way that humans do.

The only difference is that RPA can operate around the clock, non-stop, much faster, and with extremely high reliability and precision.

Relatively Fast Implementation

On the technology side, this software also provides an advantage in terms of speed of implementation. RPA is not part of the IT infrastructure, but is on top of it.

It allows users to quickly and efficiently implement to automate processes, including legacy processes, without having to replace existing systems.

Virtual robot software (bots) in RPA can imitate human work in front of the computer, such as clicking the mouse, inputting, processing data and so on.

This means that the bot can perform human tasks using ERP without having to intervene in the ERP system itself.

With these advantages, RPA is very appropriate to be implement in companies that have a lot of legacy infrastructure, such as banks, insurance companies, telecommunications, and utility companies.

Beware of Employee Resistance

As with the implementation of other technology solutions, RPA also presents its own challenges. One of the challenges is the selection of business processes to be automated.

Incorrectly automating business processes, the expected savings may not be significant.

Processes that can be replaced by RPA are, of course, business processes that are manual, repetitive, large volumes, and require many employees to complete the process.

Another challenge that is no less complicated is employee resistance. Because employees may think that the presence of RPA is a threat.

The presence of RPA is often interprete as a reduction in the number of employees because manual work can be replace by “robots”.

Run Repetitive Tasks

RPA may not be as popular as enterprise software such as ERP, CRM, or BI. However, according to Gartner’s latest data with global revenue growth reaching 63.1% or US$846 million last year,

Robotic Process Automation is the fastest growing software in the enterprise software category. This year, Gartner estimates market demand will push RPA software revenue to $1.3 billion.

RPA is favorite by businesses, primarily because of its ability to help organizations operate more efficiently by automating repetitive or manual work. The monotonous nature of work can cause worker productivity to decrease.

When they continue to do the same routine, workers will generally feel bored so they have the potential to make mistakes in their work. Therefore, the automation of this process promises a lower level of human error.

By shifting repetitive tasks to RPA, employees can do other jobs that are more strategic and less boring.

The tasks that RPA can automate are generally high-volume, repetitive, multi-person, rule-based, and low-variety tasks.

8 Benefits of RPA

1. Save Time

Process automation allows you to save time on internal processes, such as creating new employee records, processing claims, updating passwords in bulk, etc.

You can also do things for your clients and suppliers with less time and fewer employees, such as processing invoices from vendors, updating customer records, aggregating information from various IT applications for letters to customers, etc.

2. Save Cost

The conventional way to make multiple IT applications connect to each other and transfer data seamlessly requires the API of these applications to perform “integration”.

However, buying these APIs for these proprietary IT applications is likely to be expensive. Especially if you want to integrate with large enterprise solutions such as ERP systems.

This method will also require a large team of highly skilled programmers to configure the connections between multiple IT applications.

3. Increase Employee Satisfaction

With RPA, employees can pay attention to tasks that are more important than putting their time into mundane and repetitive tasks such as updating information into multiple databases.

Being able to devote more time to activities that are more valuable to the business, employees can have a better sense of job satisfaction.

They can focus on the tasks that humans do best – such as planning, creative brainstorming for new ideas, talking to customers and convincing them to buy more products, etc.

4. Flexible

One of RPA’s strongest points is being able to use the same IT system as your FTE (full-time employee) – minus the complicated integration with all applications. This technology can also be customized based on requirements.

5. Reliable RPA

Because RPA is a robot, it doesn’t get sick, tired, or bored. Plus, you can make it record completed activities so you can track your work easily.

6. High Quality and Accurate

Since humans tend to experience burnout, they may forget things and allow a certain degree of carelessness and mistakes. The human factor can turn disastrous for a business, due to the possibility of distorting data.

Once you teach the defined process steps to an RPA robot. It can perform tasks with a high degree of accuracy, unlike humans who might make mistakes. Especially when the transaction volume increases.

7. Higher Productivity

RPA robots can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This means that you can get work done even after your living, breathing employees have retired to bed.

This allows more work to be done per employee, significantly increasing productivity.

Scripts created in Gleematic RPA can be broken down into smaller modules, which can then be reused for multiple processes.

This again increases productivity because you don’t have to create every new script from scratch.

8. Adhere to User Generated Rules

The RPA robot can follow the exact steps as required according to government regulations. This software robot will also skip steps, so you can ensure compliance with your process.

Conclusion

If the work is done by a software technology, then will humans lose their jobs? The answer is no.

With the presence of RPA, humans will have more opportunities to be more productive in doing interesting and creative work. Humans will also be more efficient.

Humans will not be bored by doing repetitive work. They will be more agile in creating new innovations to increase business opportunities for companies.