Successful Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

Are you considering RPA? Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, can be an excellent way to streamline processes and increase your team’s efficiency, but the right approach is mandatory. Here’s what you need to know when considering RPA and why Intelligent RPA may be a strategic option.

What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?

Many people confuse RPA with Machine Learning and AI. How does Robotic Process Automation work? An easy way to think of RPA is that the software technology allows for creating “software-based robots,” or “bots” for short. In other words, software programming that can complete rote business procedures.

RPA bots learn, imitate, and carry out rules-based processes. They interact with data and systems much the same way that human users may. Bots can review, input, identify, sort, extract, and organize data, as well as carry out defined actions.

Robotic Process Automation benefits are that many of these time-consuming, repetitive tasks and processes are much more efficient when carried out by software bots. They can increase a team’s work capacity by 35-50%. They can complete tasks in a fraction of the time, with greater accuracy, and can perform 24 hours per day, if needed. In some cases, the ROI on RPA is estimated at around 200% within the first year of implementation, offering significant cost savings.

The actual benefits of Robotic Process Automation can be more complex to measure than just time and money. This heightened efficiency allows you to streamline workflows. It also frees your team to engage in more productive (less mundane) work and complete the creative tasks where a human touch and ingenuity are required. Ultimately, this flexibility and effectiveness can increase not only your profits, but your strategic advantage by keeping your organization nimble and ready to adapt to your customers’ needs. It’s difficult to quantify the true ROI on RPA, but all things considered, it may be even higher in terms of customer satisfaction, employee morale, and company reputation.

RPA implementation is possible without disrupting your current systems. Using RPA allows you to scale up productivity to demand, which is helpful when you have a more significant workload on your team. You’ll also eliminate the incidence of manual human error. It takes the pressure off your team and helps you stay compliant and up-to-date without stress.

As you explore the possibilities of RPA, consider the repetitive tasks that could free up your team:

• Completing forms
• Moving files
• Organizing folders
• Extracting data
• Organizing and sorting data
• Running and analyzing reports
• Interpreting and accepting messages
• Directing inquiries

RPA is appropriate in a variety of industries, from manufacturing to healthcare. Robotic Process Automation is helpful for retail and the public sector, financial services, legal services, and many other areas. Any place where businesses need to move data via rules-driven and repeatable processes is an ideal target for RPA assistance. Processes suitable for RPA should also have a defined trigger or set interval for performance.

Rethinking RPA: Avoiding Low-Code Paradigms

The active use of  Robotic Process Automation platforms to quickly automate manual work has been a steady trend across business enterprises in recent years. RPA offers a clearly fast and cheap solution for many processes; it’s also easy to implement.

The desire to speed up RPA development and minimize the associated costs has prompted many vendors to use low-code paradigms. No-code and low-code software development lets programmers quickly deploy applications using declarative programming paradigms and simple visual programming language.

While it can be tempting to go the low-code route, our practice shows several shortcomings when opting for these quick solutions:

• Despite gaining time and saving on costs for simple business processes, low-code development becomes more costly and not flexible enough for developing complex processes.
• Supporting robotic solutions requiring frequent adjustments and refinements can also be more problematic and costly—especially for companies implementing RPA for many processes.
• Specialists trained in low-code development approaches are often not prepared for the professional maintenance of IT systems.

To avoid these drawbacks, consider an RPA platform that supports Intelligent Automation, allowing for future scalability and flexibility. If you’re considering RPA as a potential solution for your business, it’s essential to consider the long-term needs of your business and how your needs may grow and change in the future.

The Importance of Intelligent Automation

What is Intelligent Automation in RPA? There’s a growing demand for Robotic Process Automation platforms that can support Intelligent Automation. Intelligent RPA allows the software to learn and adjust its behavior in response to changing inputs.

The Intelligent Automation approach is mainly applicable in processing heterogeneous, semi-structured documents. Processing these types of documents often requires significant time and effort from your company’s employees. But on the other hand, automation of these processes using purely algorithmic approaches is also quite tricky.

The solution to this problem is using and implementing Machine Learning (ML) methods. However, ML can’t provide 100% recognition, and human involvement is still required in cases where the recognition confidence of the model is insufficient.

Additionally, if there’s a periodic change or expansion of the range of input documents, it can lead to the degradation of the probabilistic characteristics of the model. In this case, the model must be retrained, which can take time.

It’s important to include these factors in the processes developed by RPA. The process should consist of a procedure for saving the results of human correction, as well as the procedures and considerations for the subsequent retraining on the actual data.

Traditional RPA doesn’t learn as it goes. If something changes within the data, an RPA bot won’t be able to reconfigure its approach or adjust. But with ML and Intelligent RPA, the possibilities and strategies are growing and changing.

Intelligent RPA has more tools available and greater abilities. In addition, these newer Robotic Process Automation technologies are beginning to expand skills to include NLP (natural language processing), character recognition, and image recognition. These new skills can enable RPAs to understand documents and different speech patterns, decipher unstructured data, and more.

The possibilities are continuing to grow, and it’s important to consider your company’s needs, not just right now but down the road. At IBA Group, we have over 100 RPA and ML experts who can help you successfully explore solutions, including RPA software.

We have our EasyRPA, an implementation-first platform ideal for developing, deploying, and monitoring software robots. In addition, with use our extensive expertise in WorkFusion, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere technologies to help you find the best solution for your needs. We not only provide a unique RPA and ML solution that meets your needs, but also train your IT personnel to maintain and expand your automation to achieve seamless automated intelligence across your enterprise. Contact us to learn more about RPA success for your business.