Robotic Process Automation Solutions

 

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions can help businesses improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations by eliminating manual tasks, automating desktop activities and delivering greater consistency and control over systems, data and processes.

RPA uses software, commonly known as a ‘robot’, to capture and interpret existing IT applications to enable transaction processing, data manipulation and communication across multiple IT systems. They are best suited for processes with repeatable, predictable interactions with IT applications.

RPA solutions perform routine business processes by mimicking the way people interact with applications through a user interface and following simple rules to make decisions.  The best processes to automate are those which are repetitive, prone to human error, involve digital data, time critical and are rule based.

RPA solutions are also non-intrusive, leveraging the existing infrastructure without causing disruption to underlying systems which are already in place. 

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Robotic Process Automation Solutions:

Related Content: Download our business toolkit on how to map your Robotic Process Automation journey!

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What are some of the benefits of Robotic Process Automation solutions?
 

•  Low cost: Bots are typically low-cost and easy to implement, requiring no custom software or deep systems integration.
• Customer satisfaction - freeing up customer-service personnel from forms, paperwork etc so they focus on delivering personalised customer service
• Increase productivity and reduce staffing costs - automates repetitive, rules-based processes and complete tasks five times faster
• Improved employee engagement and morale - enabled them to add more value by removing the repetitive tasks
• Improve Accuracy - 100 percent accurate, 100 percent consistent and 100 percent compliant with policies
• Visible Return on Investment - RPA workforce can prove ROI with lightening speed
• No disruption to underlying systems - leverages existing infrastructure

Enterprises can also supercharge their automation efforts by adding cognitive technologies to RPA, such as ML, speech recognition, and natural language processing, meaning that they can automate higher-order tasks that in the past needed the capabilities of humans.

Examples of Robotic Process Automation Solutions In Action

Banking - RPA helped the organisations SLAs

An Italian bank was struggling to meet it's SLA's due to the number of calls their contact centre were receiving. Agents were handling a large number of calls a month and were spending lots of time on the follow up activities after each call (e.g data entry).

RPA End Result: Implementing an RPA solution helped automate many of the manual post-call activities such as logging job tickets and filing claim requests. As a result, the contact centre now meets their process SLAs, has reduced their average handling time of the wrap up phase, and has seen an accuracy in the handling of more fraud alerts per month. 

Related Content: Read our RPA Blog series!

Government - RPA helped save operational costs

A national tax collecting authority were losing a large amount of money in tax fraud annually. They hired a third party vendor to contact customers to validate and update personal information, however the vendor had no access to the records to update them due to security restrictions.

RPA End Result: Instead, they introduced an RPA solution which could process up to 250,000 updated records each day to tackle the backlog. This saved a large sum of money as well as ensuring 100% accuracy in updating the records. 

Utilities - RPA cut administrative tasks so agents could focus on value added tasks

A global utilities company found themselves handling 15,000 address change requests every month, processed by 80 contact centre agents. Error rates were high, agents were using different interfaces and efficiency was poor.

RPA End Result: Robotic Process Automation was introduced along with a single interface. This meant robots automatically created or updated records within the CRM system as well as issuing a request for meter readings. Time required to complete change requests was cut down from 11 minutes to 1 as well as eliminating data entry errors.

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Top Tips for effective RPA Implementation
 

• Do your research:

RPA is a relatively new technology and the market as well as product offerings and features have shifted in recent years.  Before buying an RPA solution, do your homework and invest the time to build a business case for it. Moreover as finding internal expertise will likely be difficult, it might make sense to seek help from an expert adviser when developing a strategy, selecting a vendor, and deploying and maintaining the technology.

• Educate your employees on RPA

Because it’s a disruptive technology, RPA can cause a lot of angst among workers. For that reason, it’s important to clarify what the technology will and will not do with regard to employees’ job roles.

• Decide where the technology will work best

When deploying RPA tools, it’s best to identify processes where you’re most likely to see a positive business impact. Doing so, will greatly increase your likelihood of success in modernizing your business processes. But keep in mind that figuring out the best RPA targets might not be easy.

• Take time to think about your design

Many implementations fail because design and change are poorly managed. In the rush to get something deployed,  companies can overlook communication exchanges, between the various bots, which can break a business process. Before you implement, make sure you map out how you expect the various bots to work together.