Benefits of Robotic Process Automation – Robotic Process Automation Benefits. Here in this blog post coding compiler will discuss on how an organization can efficiently and accurately implement automation processes with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and what are the Benefits of RPA.
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
What can RPA do for Organizations?
RPA Delivering Digital Transformation where it matters.
RPA allows work to be done much more quickly and accurately,
Reduces costs,
Improves efficiency and lays the groundwork for an improved customer experience.
In the near future, we will see machines taking a more active role in enhancing human endeavors and renovating the customer experience with RPA will become a digital priority.
Robotic Process Automation Benefits
Increase efficiency
100% accuracy
24×7 productivity
Improve customer experience
Enhance visibility
Improve time to market
Comply with industry regulations
Accelerate digital transformation programmes
Reduce costs
Speed up process time
Boost scalability
Optimise resources
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Today, companies in many sectors are already applying RPA, in order to transform customer services, financial performance and improve compliance. They expect RPA to drive productivity by automating transactional tasks and to increase profitability by gleaning relevant business information from unstructured operational data.
Robotic Process Automation is expected to save companies 50-70% on labor costs by making intelligent use of resources, near-zero error rates, improved compliance and reduced process cycle time. And RPA doesn’t always mean redundancy. RPA allows employees to focus on only jobs humans can do; strategy, creativity and connecting with people.
The key to delivering rapid automation success is finding the right balance between technology and skilled staff. With Virtual Workers managing structured process execution, human resources can be focused on activities that add greater business value. That’s better for staff, better for business efficiency, and also provides an improved customer experience.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study – Back Office Administration. Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. How your company can efficiently and accurately optimise back-office resources for significant cost savings with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – Back Office Administration
Robotic Process Automation helps in optimise back-office resources for significant cost savings.
Back Office Administration Overview
Every organization has routine tasks that demand accuracy and speed but don’t really require organizationing to accomplish. In fact, such repetitive processes – clerical, time-consuming and error-prone – can be a cause of frustration for employees, as well as a waste of precious resources.
RPA technology is designed to reduce or eliminate the need for people to perform back-office processes, such as those found in finance, accounting, supply chain management, customer services and human resources.
Using RPA, you can automate administration and reporting tasks with Virtual Workers as your back office admin team. These robots handle end-to-end processes, essentially performing any task that a human user would otherwise do manually. A robot can carry out any type of task which is assigned to it, performing it quickly and accurately – every time.
Automation is particularly useful for Finance and Accounting departments where they can automate accounts payable accounts receivable, order management, invoicing, collections and reporting processes to work more efficiently.
RPA also works well for Human Resources, to automatically handle activities such as payroll and absence management, starter and leaver processes and employee data management.
By eliminating repetitive and manually interactive processes, RPA drives efficiency, enhances productivity, consistency and accuracy. This enables companies to improve response time to new markets and adhere to global regulatory requirements.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Financial Services
Challenge – With over 300 staff using a legacy mainframe application to manage the savings and investments for over 400,000 people, this organisation’s customer service operation was struggling to cope with its inbound customer requirements.
Due to restrictions in the 18-year-old system, processing cases often required the use of Excel spreadsheets containing complex business rules, so handling the volume of requests from customers such as policy holders and independent financial advisers – such as updating details, accessing beneficiary details or calculating lump sum payments – was extremely manual and complex with handling each case taking an average of over 20 minutes.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
Virtual Workers provide automated execution of customer services activities, reducing average execution times from over 20 minutes to just 2 minutes. Actions can be initiated either by customer services agents or directly by customers or financial advisers in a simple web portal customised for each user type.
Alongside process efficiency, the instances of human error have been removed, improving accuracy – a vital factor in a regulated financial services environment. With 10x faster execution, customer experience is streamlined, and service staff are free to offer improved customer interaction. The organisation has estimated productivity improvements of circa £1.5M annually, and an ROI in less than two months.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study – Digital Online Initiatives. Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. How your company can efficiently and accurately working together to work faster by connecting process islands with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – Digital & Online Initiatives
Robotic Process Automation helps in Improving customer experience in digital & online initiatives.
Digital & Online Initiatives Overview
High volume external consumer or internal user phone, email and postal based orders and requests are costly and inefficient, labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Moving transactions and customer or user interactions online is a great way to deliver efficiency gains. With real-time automated execution via an online presence, accessible 24/7, organizations can reduce costs and vastly improve customer experience.
For most organizations, the challenge to achieve this is that legacy management systems have not been designed for self-service and are unsuitable or impossible to offer to customers direct interaction.
But with RPA, existing services delivered in existing applications can be taken online in just a matter of days.
Using a web-based portal to capture user requirements and display results and outputs, which seamlessly links to Virtual Workers who process requirements by interacting with existing applications and systems means that services can be digitized rapidly and non-disruptively, and offered online without change to the underlying process or systems.
And because those systems remain unchanged, the digitized service can seamlessly operate alongside the existing human one, to allow a pain-free transition between communication channels, or even to leave both in place to serve different user profiles.
Digitising services with RPA means any rules-based process can be offered for digital consumption and enables the business to offer a multitude of online, self-service tools, including online request catalogs, customer service functions or citizen support for public sector organizations.
But with RPA, existing services delivered in existing applications can be taken online in just a matter of days.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Public Sector
Challenge – This Public Sector organisation is responsible for managing the process for appealing penalties issued for parking violations. With 10.8M tickets issued annually, managing the processes associated with appeals involved high volumes of manual processes, paper-based transactions and exchange of information by physical post.
Recipients of a ticket who decided to appeal would complete a form on the back of the ticket and post it, along with any evidence, to a processing centre, where the information would be scanned, validated and either processed or returned for more information.
This was a labor-intensive process requiring a lot of human intervention, the risk of error was high and the interaction using paper and mail was slow, restricting the flow of revenue to the point that the cost of processing each appeal was more than the revenue they received from the associated fine.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
A single web portal was deployed to provide an online appeals service, with tailored theming to reflect the relevant local authority, where users were able to quickly and easily submit their appeal online. As information is entered, auto-validation ensures the forms cannot be submitted incorrectly – thus removing the 12-15% rework associated with incorrect or incomplete forms in the manual process.
Once submitted, a Virtual Worker is able to manage the appeal and processes it in the existing case management system, executing all of the required information gathering and evidence collection relevant to the appeal, before passing to an adjudicator for final assessment.
This efficient process demonstrated a significant reduction in the costs of manually processing appeals and a vastly improved citizen experience.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. Robotic Process Automation Case Study – Human Resources Use Case. How your company can efficiently and accurately working together to work faster by connecting process islands with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – Human Resources
Robotic Process Automation helps in manage data in efficiently and accurately working together to work faster by connecting process islands .
Human Resources Overview
Connecting Process Islands – It is not uncommon for end-to-end business processes to span multiple teams or departments within an organization or even externally into third party providers, partners or customers.
Many find themselves with several islands of disconnected tasks, linked by inefficient handoffs and touch process flow. In some cases, the tasks themselves may already be highly automated, providing high efficiencies within the task, but ultimately these disconnected islands make it difficult to provide a fully optimised end-to-end flow.
Connecting these pockets of activity, or existing islands of automation, is the key to a fully automated end-to-end workflow and a more efficient business process.
RPA can provide the ideal solution to connect these islands and bring all the tasks together to deliver a fully automated and connected service to boost productivity, improve time to market and enhance customer service.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Human Resources
Challenge – A major offshore outsourcing firm with over 200,000 staff was struggling to manage its employee turnover process. With different employee details being held in a variety of disparate systems, the starters/leavers process was complex and inefficient.
Parts of this process, such as payroll, user accounts, and Staff ID were undertaken by HR, some by Security, some of IT, and some by Facilities. All these departments worked independently and completed their tasks in isolation making it a lengthy and complicated process, made worse by handoffs between departments being in the form of unstructured email, thus needing a great deal of data re-entry at each stage.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
An automated process was built to connect these islands of activity and deliver a fully automated end-to-end workflow process. The solution now takes information upfront via a simple secure web portal interface and initiates each activity sequentially or in parallel where possible.
The steps are interrelated into a seamless workflow process and human error has been removed. As a result, the starter process has improved hugely, with a process previously consuming many man-hours of resource now executed with a minimal human touch.
It also offers the added benefit of ensuring that employees who leave the organization are immediately decommissioned from all associated systems and access rights removed has delivered immeasurable reductions in risk exposure.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. RPA in Data Migration & Management. How your company can efficiently and accurately manage data with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – Data Migration & Management
Robotic Process Automation helps in manage data in efficiently and accurately.
Data Migration & Management Overview
Big data is getting bigger. More and more data is being generated from multiple sources and it’s getting tougher and more and more time to consume to manage, measure and analyze. And with this increasing amount of data available, manual processes and human intervention leave a greater margin of error.
Many businesses today collate data from multiple sources, such as web pages for online orders, invoice workflow, email exchanges and Excel spreadsheets, effectively requiring individuals to log in and out of multiple systems, copying and pasting data between different sources and formats.
Implementing RPA to automate this high-volume, low complexity tasks cannot only ensure optimal resource utilization but also improve employee productivity.
By replicating human data entry, RPA can be deployed to transfer, manipulate and migrate application and system data quickly, reliably and with a full audit trail, thus avoiding manual re-keying and re-entry and vastly reducing the high instances of human error.
By removing this the margin for error, the data becomes 100% accurate, so the insights and subsequent business decisions are more likely to succeed.
Deploying RPA can also enhance customer and supplier system integration as it provides an electronic interface to the customer and/or supplier systems where a system to system, interface is challenging or not possible.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Business Process Services
Challenge – This IT and Business Process outsourcer was providing a management service for one of its customers, recording all activities in its own case management application, a shared platform used across all of their clients.
However, this specific customer required the information to be recorded in its own dedicated system too. Using the client’s case management application as well as their own was simply inefficient. However, the two systems could not be connected due to client restrictions, so the only way to get case information from the client system to the service provider system and vice-versa was to use people.
By recruiting temporary staff and redeploying staff from other duties, 12 employees were assigned to manually rekeying the records from one system to the other. This slow process was creating a huge backlog of cases to be migrated and updated.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
An automated solution was deployed with Virtual Workers replicating the data from one system to the other, replacing the 12 staff with just two Virtual Workers and delivering work out of hours to minimise the overall customer impact. The backlog of cases was quickly cleared and the reduced cost of temporary staff saved the client around £200K in the first three months of operation.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. RPA in IT & Infrastructure Support. How your company can improve efficiency and faster time to deployment with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – IT & Infrastructure Support
Robotic Process Automation helps in faster time to deployment in Information Technology and Infrastructure support.
IT & Infrastructure Industry Overview
IT support staff are highly skilled, well trained and valuable resources. But many businesses see their IT Support team spending too much time manually undertaking systems administration tasks, running diagnostics and system checks, managing patch processes, backups and many other daily tasks and just do not have the time or the budget to increase head count to handle more high value, skilled tasks, or work on business improvement and change projects.
Companies can optimise their IT resources with the support of a Virtual Workforce. Through either assisted-automation (automation with human support either to initiate or approve actions), or by fully automating (no human intervention) existing user actions and taking over labor-intensive administrative tasks, employees are freed up for more intellectually demanding activities. By focusing on subjective decision-making, innovation and customer-facing activity that can’t be automated, the IT team is far more efficiently employed and feel more professionally engaged.
This Virtual Workforce is, of course, available 24/7. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t deviate from the defined process. They never have a bad day. They work at machine speeds. And at busy times, in an instant more of them can be called upon to step in and take up the load.
They are simple to deploy – often in areas where automation was previously considered to be unviable, and they are easy to manage with a significantly lower level of investment. And above all, you can rest assured that the jobs are getting done – on time, consistently and accurately.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Information Technology
Challenge – A market leading managed service provider was faced with the challenge of a new client needing a niche skilled support solution for its systems and applications. The complex management requirements for the new client’s systems left the IT provider with the prospect of having to employ expensive experts to run a 24/7 service operation.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
Virtual Workers were deployed to manage and automate the various complex, low volume system administration tasks around IT applications and infrastructure, including validation, regular testing, diagnostics and fault remediation.
This replaced the need to recruit further highly trained staff to perform these tasks. The quality of the service delivered by the provider has improved vastly, with previously time consuming, yet critical activities now being executed more regularly, ultimately offering speedy system support.
The solution not only delivered a better service, but also produced an estimated saving of £250K in staff costs compared to the use of offshore resources, or £500K compared to locally employed staff.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study and RPA Use Cases. How your business can improve efficiency and customer satisfaction with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA Use Cases – Customer Service & Support Desk
Robotic Process Automation can improve efficiency and customer satisfaction
Customer Service & Support Desk Industry Overview
Typically, call centers and service desks use a number of different systems and applications and often undertake a high volume of low complexity repetitive tasks.
When someone calls in, service agents have to navigate these applications while at the same time managing their interaction on the call with the customer. If users connect via email or messaging systems, agents need to translate information from those systems while executing the required actions.
But having to jump back and forth between systems and screens shifts is slow and inaccurate. In a live call, the focus moves away from the caller and the perception of the customer is impacted.
Disparate systems may require the same information – who hasn’t experienced being asked the same identity verification questions multiple times by the same call center?
Additionally, post-call follow up, such as updating records and recording closure activity can take almost as much time as the call itself, thus negatively impacting upon agent productivity.
A good customer experience can drive long-term growth. Which is why customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal of service desk and call center performance.
RPA can be used to automate many of the common tasks in a customer service or support desks, such as incident management, billing queries, user administration and updating records, to deliver many benefits.
Not only can it ensure tasks run flawlessly and consistently during waking and sleeping hours and address and resolve problems on its own, it can link disparate systems and applications in one single console, build a unified knowledge base that delivers relevant data in real time, and automatically set up and run processes.
Agents are freed from having to process repetitive, manual tasks and can focus on developing their customer-centric skills. And don’t forget, Virtual Workers can be many times faster than a person.
This allows for a faster turnaround for customer requests and significantly improves SLAs.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study
Sector: Managed Services
Challenge – A leading European IT Managed Service provider was running a support service for a leading industrial customer who had a large number of employees and a broad mix of legacy and new applications. Handling over 15,000 calls a month, a significant amount of time was being spent by the 1st line support team executing user administration tasks.
In fact, due to the complexity of the systems and processes, the average time for each such incident was almost 6 minutes, as the agent had to inefficiently navigate various systems to access, manipulate and update information, subsequently offering an inefficient service and poor customer experience.
Robotic Process Automation Case Study Outcome
Delivered within 2 weeks, the automated solution – provided through Virtual Workers in place of human agents – was able to complete tasks in less than 50 seconds – that’s an 83% reduction in execution time.
Along with this improved customer service, the volume of support resource required has been significantly reduced and a number of support technicians have subsequently been redeployed, producing a tangible cost efficiency saving of an estimated €1M.
Robotic Process Automation From Thoughtonomy. In this fast-paced, competitive and dynamic world, the need for speed is vital. Businesses want increased productivity with less resource, more cost savings, and improved accuracy, to offer the ultimate customer experience. Customers increasingly expect an on-demand service with an instant response and service – anywhere and anytime they want it.
Robotic Process Automation
Many of the limitations to meeting such immediate, round the clock customer expectations, relate to the people-centric way services are delivered. As such, there has been a surge of interest in robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and process automation in recent years to address these challenges.
Some commentators express concerns at the impact, including the World Economic Forum, whose 2016 Davos Report forecasts “Disruptive labor market changes, including the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, will result in a net loss of 5.1 million jobs over the next five years in 15 leading countries.” However, Forrester takes a more balanced and realistic view, stating “advances in automation technologies will mean humans increasingly work side by side with robots, software agents, and other machines.”
In fact, with the global pace of change, organizations that continue to rely on manual processing will lose their competitive edge. As process automation enables large volumes of tasks to be achieved quickly and accurately, and in turn, reduces costs and improves efficiencies, Robotic Process Automation provides the foundation for significant competitive advantage.
It’s clear that Robotic Process Automation has the potential to add substantial value and improve customer outcomes – and the concept of Virtual Workers operating as part of a blended human and machine workforce is here to stay.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Today, across the world, many millions of hours of staff in customer services, business support and operations are being consumed with mundane, manual, labor-intensive activities. While much of the headline-grabbing may come from the concept of Artificial Intelligence and self-learning systems, the fact is that if these mundane tasks were automated, the benefits would be huge, with staff freed up to focus on higher value activities, improved speed, and accuracy and significantly reduced costs.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the application of automation software to carry out tasks and activities in applications and systems by interacting with them in the same way as a human. “Virtual Workers” replicate the specific actions a human would take while working with IT systems, the decisions they make, and the logical processes they follow. This might include interacting with an in-house application, website, user portal, email, Microsoft Office suite and more.
Furthermore, virtual workers work 24/7 at the machine – not human – speeds. They are technology-agnostic, can use any system or device with a graphical or command line interface and can carry out any data-driven, rule-based process. As they are using (rather than replacing) an organization’s existing technology, they are both completely complementary to core systems and entirely non-disruptive for day-to-day business.
This makes RPA a capability that can be leveraged irrespective of industry and application, delivering ROI often within 3 to 6 months. RPA is fast emerging as a disruptive technology solution capable of delivering multiple benefits. It is already having an impact at organizations currently deploying virtual workforces.
In the next few years, RPA will become an essential tool for more and more businesses looking to reduce costs, enhance accuracy, increase scalability, boost productivity and increase compliance. The benefits are simply too significant to be ignored.
Robotic Process Automation – The line between hype and reality. The field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has advanced significantly over the past few years, but prospective users need to look beyond the hype to apply this emerging technology effectively. By interacting with existing software systems at the level of the graphical user interface, RPA can bring about a “virtual integration” of multiple systems while executing repetitive work more accurately and reliably than humans can.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Getting Past The Hype –With all the hype about the advance of robotics, people can be forgiven for thinking that robots are on the verge of making humans redundant in their work environments. Consider, for example, this headline from the London Daily Mail: “Is 2014 the year YOUR job will be taken by a robot?” The term jobocalypse has even been coined to describe this anticipated revolution. It conjures up an image of mass displacement of human labor.
Certainly, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has advanced significantly over the past few years, but there is no jobocalypse in sight. Experts see a different reality: While Rapid Automation (RA) or, more simply, “robotics” reduces the need for repetitive human effort, there are still distinct limitations to the types of work in which it can be applied.
In 2014, not many businesses had hundreds of people banging away at computers to do routine tasks. At companies, most of the processes we take on are fairly complex. Identifying the pieces that can be completely automated is the first step, but the bigger part of the job is to reorient the workforce around tasks that require judgment. When you take on an RPA project today, you’re changing the nature of the work; as such, you need to balance automation with decision-making ability.
In 2014, not many businesses had hundreds of people banging away at computers to do routine tasks. At consulting firms, most of the processes we take on are fairly complex. Identifying the pieces that can be completely automated is the first step, but the bigger part of the job is to reorient the workforce around tasks that require judgment. When you take on an RPA project today, you’re changing the nature of the work; as such, you need to balance automation with decision-making ability.
Robotic Process Automation in BPO
RA solutions are helping to drive the development of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Initially, the industry was based on labor arbitrage, scaling, sizing, offshoring, constructing, and economies of scale, but it has evolved. Today, it delivers business impact by improving process quality, using concepts like Six Sigma.
The third phase that we’re seeing now is focused on emerging technologies like RPA, mobility, cloud, big data, and advanced visualization. When these elements are used in combination, they help improve efficiency by providing a new layer of engagement to the client environment.
When applied to this systematic approach, robotic automation offers considerable potential for addressing key pain points in traditional “system of records” technologies, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Still, there are limitations to the usability and impact of robots. Prospective users need to recognize which types of transactions can be performed well by robots, identify the appropriate sphere of intervention, and form effective plans for using RPA in a rapidly changing environment.
Robotic Process Automation Today
RA differs from more direct types of automation. It interacts with different software systems at the level of the graphical user interface or presentation layer: the same level as a human user of the system. Existing systems can, therefore, work together more efficiently, because RA performs some tasks faster and more reliably than humans do.
This shifts human effort away from routine processing functions and toward managing exceptions and optimizing business processes. One principal advantage is that RA links existing systems without requiring their direct integration. Instead, it applies a variety of familiar user interfaces, such as ERP systems and Microsoft Office documents and databases. Today’s RA systems are more accurate and flexible than employees are; they improve security and compliance and are available 24/7.
While it’s critical to identify which processes are the best candidates for RA, robotics should be seen as just one component of end-to-end process improvement. At Companies, we’ve found that RA can be the inflection point that leads to the automation of other parts of the process. To get the maximum value of RA, the natural place to start is with the global process owner or the person with overall responsibility for an end-to-end process.
The Future of Robotic Process Automation
As robotic automation matures, three principal factors will drive business impact:
Utility
Cognitive Capabilities
Technology Partnerships
Utility. Robotics work effectively in high-demand, highly-scalable applications. These are often situations in which manual processes would involve considerable training and organization for short-term projects. To quickly mobilize RA solutions, the organization first needs to establish capacity. This means making long-term investments rather than addressing applications on a case-by-case basis.
Cognitive capabilities. Business models are becoming more sophisticated, with enterprises focusing on customer needs and outcomes rather than products. In this setting, automation algorithms need to work the way humans think, using natural language and learning from experience.
Technology partnerships. An ecosystem of expertise has to be in place to exploit diverse technologies, encompassing elements like big data, cloud, and machine learning.
Pulling all of this together requires cutting across traditional boundaries, and ideally uses an end to end holistic approach. The key is to automate intelligently while balancing automated and human processes. This calls for an increased reliance on management by exception, which in turn requires strong governance and compliance checkpoints.
Using Robotic Process Automation Strategically
Experience in developing and delivering RA solutions that generate business impact, by identifying the types of processes where robotics work most effectively. Companies started by estimating an “R Factor” for each process: the percentage of activity that is clearly repetitive, but also deterministic. In other words, it’s not just repetition, but also other conditions that make a process a good target for RA. These include having relatively clean data and well laid out rules. Ideal cases contain the following:
Dual data entry, where information must be input manually more than once, such as into a workflow process and then an ERP system.
Straight-through processing, where inputs from different sources (such as sales orders) need to be integrated.
Similar data extraction requests from multiple users from the same database.
Routine decision-making where conditions for referral to managers are unambiguous, such as the payment of invoices.
In cases like these, RA can achieve “virtual integration” among systems that normally don’t “talk” to each other by connecting them at the user interface level. Depending on the process’s degree of suitability, this can boost productivity by 10% to 50%. Other payoffs include increased accuracy, more flexibility, improved compliance, and 24/7 availability. What’s more, RA offers the additional benefit of collecting metadata from multiple sources and enabling downstream analytics that can garner insights and actually make operations more intelligent.
In the end, robotic automation is no panacea, and significant limitations still exist especially regarding data formats and natural language processing. RA is continuously evolving and improving in areas like non-digital input types, machine learning, and natural language.
The reality we face today is that RPA needs to be addressed as part of a broad briefcase of tools. The use of these tools must be balanced with more direct forms of automation to get the best mix, thereby achieving maximum impact on the overall agility of the business to respond to challenging shifts in its environment.
