What is Robotic Process Automation, its benefits and use cases

What is Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables businesses of any size to automate regular processes across applications and systems in the same way that a human would.

It consists of 3 major components:

• Robotic – A Robot is a creature capable of being trained by a computer to do complicated tasks. This task, in terms of RPA, would be to imitate human activities.
• Process – A process is a set of actions/activities or steps/tasks carried out in order to attain a certain goal.
• Automation – Automation is when a process or activity is completed automatically, without the need for human interaction.

Using automation Robotics is here to execute rule-based, repetitive, and high-volume jobs, allowing people to focus on other aspects of business that demand cognitive thought during the day. An RPA robot can navigate any technological platform that can be handled by a person. Today, cross-functional and cross-application macros have the potential to control any software installed on your computer. It may be used to automate labor-intensive back-office procedures such as workflows and other back-office processes. The concept is to use a virtual workforce to replace individuals who perform repetitive and dull administrative chores.

It should be mentioned that a typical person may achieve production levels of 60-70 percent with few faults, however a robot’s productivity is 100 percent with no errors, which is extremely astounding. At the same time, the RPA process takes into account the task or project’s process compliance or governance as an input in the form of business rules. It may also be used with artificial intelligence to provide a smart automation system that improves decision-making and eliminates manual labour in any business. Organizations must plan to refocus their present skill sets in order to adapt to future requirements; otherwise, firms would likely blame technology rather than themselves for failure.

To sum things up, here’s what an RPA software can do for you:

• Perform repetitive, structured transactions processes
• Scale-up operations and processes rapidly in your company
• Interact with and update multiple applications in a transactional manner to keep everything in sync
• Validate data in places that are complex for people to understand
• Perform calculations faster than humans

Why are Companies interested in RPA – The Benefits

• Expedite Operational Efficiency leading to Rapid ROI
• Eliminates Repeat Work
• Enhanced Ability to Manage Multiple Tasks
• Leveraging existing Infrastructure
• Increased Compliance
• Reduced Business response Time
• Better Customer Experience

In layman’s terms, it aids in increasing production and substantially lowering total cycle time in compared to human constraints. It also lowers processing costs by 40% to 80% while also creating a work environment where employees can be watched 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It does not need any downtime and has no human limitations such as sleep, hunger, or other regulatory constraints.

It helps the human workforce to focus more on more significant duties by minimising the arduous or boring jobs. According to a Gartner analysis, it will result in the loss of 1.8 million employment while also creating more than 2.3 million new jobs.

Aside from lowering costs and eliminating non-compliances in the process, business executives feel it is a scalable solution that can be used by any company in any industry, ensuring that better quality requirements are met 100% of the time.

Factors to qualify a process for RPA implementation

• Manual Intervention and Repetitive in Nature
• Rules-based tasks with decision making based on standardized and predictive rules.
• Processes with low exception rates.
• Inputs to the process should be standard and structured.
• Process Volume.
• Process Consistency

Robotic Process Automation Use Cases

Health

1. Account Settlement – By combining data from many departments and sending a message to the patient, RPA software may assist healthcare companies in determining a patient’s bill. Using RPA to automate account settlement lowers payment delays and mistakes in bill calculation.
2. Improve treatment cycles – Extraction and analysis of patient data can assist hospitals in determining which treatment plan works best for their patients, which diseases are frequently identified, which drugs have proven to be successful for patients, and what kind of situations they see frequently.

Banking

1. Reduced Cycle Time– By removing the copying and pasting of client information from one banking system to the next, consumer loan processing time may be lowered from 30 minutes to only 10 minutes.
2. Higher Accuracy –It is now feasible to increase the correctness of new-bank-account-opening requests, resulting in fewer downstream mistakes and better data quality in the system. All of this may be accomplished by reducing data-translation mistakes in incoming new-bank-account-opening-request emails to the main banking system.

Insurance

1. Faster claims processing. Employees must gather information from various documents and copy/move it into multiple systems in order to process claims. It’s a time-consuming procedure that causes customers to wait longer for a response when they make a claim. With a single mouse click, RPA can transport massive volumes of claims data.
2. Simplified new business onboarding. Sometimes a company’s growth outpaces its ability to manage it. Manual inter-departmental data migration from new customers being on-boarded may be reduced by at least 50 percent — within weeks – with the help of robots.

Finance

1. Accounts payable – By implementing a robot to assist accountants with the transcription of inbound invoice information from PDFs (invoice number, data received, and dollar amount) into web-based SAP, internal use spreadsheets used for reporting, and by placing a final PDF copy on a local server to maintain SOX compliance, vendor invoice processing cycle times were reduced by 60%.
2. Financial close and reporting –Baseline Implementing RPA that automatically processes and reconciles all entries into books from spreadsheets received from business units may enhance reporting procedures by 85 percent, decreasing manual copying and data transcribing activities for finance managers.

Our Approach

RPA is an important (and less daunting) initial step toward full AI. Once the simpler, more regular portions of a job or process are operating independently, AI technology may be used to provide more complicated, cognitive automation. We promote a “Automation First” strategy for introducing RPA technology, which augments the human workforce to deliver optimum productivity and efficiency.

Stage 1: Creating a Proof of Concept (POC)

This initial phase indicates whether or not the proposed solution is technically possible. It allows businesses to prioritise tools, technologies, providers, and controls in order to determine the best strategies for implementation. The phase aids comprehension of the following:

• Which tool should be considered for automation?
• Should we have an in-house team or choose an external vendor?
• What kind of infrastructure will work best for the solution?
• What are the rules and regulations that we need to comply with?

Once the tool and processes have been identified, a cost-benefit analysis should be carried out to determine the projected return on investment through automation. For this, consider aspects such as the length of time it will take to deploy RPA, if any alternative cost-effective technology exists as a substitute for RPA, and how much profit the process to be automated would generate. Organizations can move to phase 2 of RPA deployment after analysing these criteria.

You need to identify what all you can automate. To make this step easy we have enlisted a list of areas that you can quickly scan for identifying automation opportunities.

• Rule Driven Processes
• Repetitive Processes
• Data entry Processes
• Volumes Driven Processes
• Frequent human errors

Step 2: Optimize the Identified Processes

Analyze the current process and discover opportunities for improvement using quality methodologies such as Lean, Kaizen, and others. All inefficiencies in the present process should be eliminated before beginning the RPA installation.

Step 3 : Build Business Case for the RPA Journey

In this step you need to document the key areas of this automation journey. You can prepare a well-drafted Business Case covering all the below points.

• Why does this automation require?
• What are the benefits because of this automation
• What are the pain areas that can be removed because of the automation?
• Identify the extended impacts of this automation; process that might affect this RPA automation
• Define the metrics to measure the automated process
• Define the span of control ratio between the bot and human
• What is the plan of action for re-deploying the existing resources after automation

Step 4: RPA Partner  Selection

We can either assist you in building in-house automation or we can become your knowledge partner to assist you in purchasing a ready-to-use solution.

RPA is gaining popularity, and several manufacturers (UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and others) are offering RPA solutions.

Step 5: Pilot RPA Development

This is where Q3Edge can help you with the initial creation or programming of your RPA Bot. We can provide you with skilled and trained RPA developers or teach your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on the RPA solution you’ve chosen.

Step 6 Bot Monitoring and Dry Run

It’s critical to check the BOT’s functionality during the RPA project’s implementation. We also monitor the efficiency of the log/notification methods on a regular basis. The BOT monitoring readiness is the most important thing to consider in RPA project change management. It’s critical to have design reviews in place throughout RPA project execution, as well as enough log/notification systems built in for effective BOT monitoring. Successful implementation at this stage showcase the potential of RPA to a broader business audience.

Step 7 Final Deployment

The end result is likely to be good following the effective implementation of the aforementioned sentences. By this point, the bot should have followed all standard and organisational guidelines, guaranteeing that automation accomplishes its goals. In terms of delivery and execution, companies would be in a much more regulated zone. All unknowns, such as infrastructure issues, a framework for successful change management, the arrival and tracking of CBA, and monitoring BOT in production, will be addressed.