What is RPA And How Can Automation Change My Business?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the automation of business processes using software ‘bots’ and allows simple, repetitive tasks to be performed by computers rather than people. RPA covers a wide range of tasks, such as sorting incoming email, responding automatically to chat messages, or extracting useful information from documents using Optical Character Recognition.
RPA offers a great opportunity to streamline your business processes. The wave of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) that has taken place over the last two decades means that executives are much more familiar with the concepts of workflow – determining how different parts of your business exchange information and interact. This awareness was built up as companies realised that some processes could be performed by a partner through outsourcing. To make these outsourced processes work it was important to define the information interface between the client company and the supplier managing the processes.
This knowledge can be translated well into RPA planning. Where do you have repetitive or rules-based processing in your organisation? Can you create an environment where you feed information to an RPA system and allow it to perform this work automatically?
The benefits of improving workflow in this way are multiple:
1. Optimise the time and potential of your employees by allowing them to focus on exceptions, not routine work.
2. Improve the customer experience by processing this information more reliably and quickly.
3. Achieve stronger control over your processes by ensuring that the system itself processes most work without failure – only a few complex situations need more analysis.
A new report from Forrester Research suggests that RPA will add 500,000 digital workers to the US economy – that’s the equivalent of half a million real workers, but in this case it’s software bots performing the work. In 2018, RPA-based digital workers will replace and/or augment 311,000 office and administrative positions in the US, and 260,000 sales and related positions. As a result, the RPA software market exceeded $500 million by the end of 2017 and will double to $1.06 billion by the end of 2018.
This kind of market growth is hard to ignore. Not only can RPA fundamentally transform your business, creating more engaged employees and more satisfied customers, it can reduce your ongoing cost of business too.