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John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest American, built his empire from raw manual labor without any robots or hi-tech machinery. If he had encountered Robotic Process Automation (RPA) back in the day, his wealth would have multiplied. While the lack of operational efficiency is the cost of doing business, 77% of CEOs want to create operational efficiencies for their employees, and RPAs can be beneficial. That is why “automation” has become so popular today.
Process optimization and automation is the BIG field of tomorrow, where 53% of all enterprises have started to move today. It is projected to become a market size of $2.9B by 2021 and at a CAGR of 40% till 2027. The early birds will reap the most considerable benefits. RPA explicitly reduces the margin for human error, leading to an overall improvement in recurrence, which increases precision and repeatability. Many performers have gotten 4X ROI from RPA, while the industry average is 2X ROI.
Before adopting RPA, one must know what they are and how to choose the right service provider for the same? Read on to learn how to undertake the RPA endeavor for your business.
Automating recurring, mundane tasks that reduce human efforts is called robotic process automation. The RPA makes it easy to build, deploy and manage processes that minimize human efforts from the tasks that need real attention.
Broadly, there are three types of RPA. They are:
Attended RPA is the kind of automation that requires human intervention to initiate a bot or complete a partially automated process. These are needed in places that transcend human error detection and need interventions at programmatic points. It allows them to set up processes that can help reduce manual labor, increase operational accuracy, and help optimize the overall work done by the user.
For instance, a customer care center often has 2–3 steps of an automated recorded system before talking to a human representative. Hence, it allows the RPA to narrow down the funnel to the right kind of customer service executive and helps deliver a faster solution to the user.
Unattended RPA is controlled entirely by bots. The bots are given a level of logical reasoning to make decisions to work independently of human intervention. The bots undertake the work in batches at set schedules, and the cloud and data processes are completed in the background. This type of automation is utilized mainly for back-office work.
For instance, in the case of the banking industry, when the user fills out the registration form, the unattended RPA can automatically detect the information from the registration form. It can then verify the details from the listed databases to complete the KYC verification and complete the initial onboarding of the customer.
Considered the most effective method of optimizing and automating any process, a hybrid RPA model utilizes both bots and humans to work together for front and back offices. It allows them to concentrate on the fortes they are good at and develop a fully optimized workflow that ensures quality with quantity.
As per a report by Gartner, an RPA costs 1/5th of the cost of a traditional employee. That alone makes it a tool worth getting. However, the other most prominent benefit is the 27% increase in overall productivity.
So what are the other benefits of RPA? They are:
An RPA costs ⅕ of the cost of a full-time in-house employee and ⅓ of the cost of an offshore employee. Also, while an employee works for a finite number of days, the RPA can work 24x7x365 days, making it more useful and helping reduce overall costs. It also increases the overall ROI since the business generates more revenue than the RPA tool costs.
In most cases, any aspect of RPA is considered relatively technical. However, it is pretty straightforward and allows any employee to use it. Any employee can initiate RPA with simple training, allowing the company to deploy them into more analytical tasks that can better use their skills.
- Improved Operation and Business Control
Instead of using third-party and outside resources, RPAs can automate processes that need external resources. Furthermore, they improve the overall efficiency of the in-house workforce, which helps in enhancing general business and operational control.
- Ensures Better Analytics & Insights
RPAs can generate reports faster and more accurately once the parameters and metrics of the information are defined from the get-go. This, along with generated insights, helps them analyze and make sense of large amounts of data more efficiently. Ultimately, it helps make better business decisions and informed roadmaps for future products and offerings.
- Improved Customer Experience
RPA streamlines back-office work tasks and improves the customer experience simultaneously. The customer gets a more precise and targeted solution to their problem from the customer service representative.
- Improves Accuracy and Consistency
Since RPA is a bot, the results are consistent and accurate. As a result, human error for recurring tasks is eliminated. Hence, RPA improves the accuracy and the flow of information transfer.
Since RPAs are often updated according to industry norms, allowing the user company to be agile in using newer technology. Furthermore, it helps reduce the manual labor burden on many users, fastening the process while making it more elegant.
Now that you know the type of RPAs and what benefits they can bring to your business, you can explore some of the use cases for RPAs in various industries. Furthermore, you can also find out where you can implement it most effectively for the best ROI. The sectors that use RPA the most are:
- Telecommunications – used by 80% of Telecom industry leaders
Report Generation
In telecom, the most recurring task for teams is the report generation and handling of similar kinds of extensive volume data for drawing insights. Report generation takes a fair bit of time and effort since it needs data collection from multiple sources and collating the right metrics. After completing these steps, actionable insights are drawn. Using RPA for report generation at set intervals can save time for employees, who can then directly get to crunching the numbers to derive insights to determine the go-to-market strategy.
Customer Service
Customer service staff can set up RPA to handle the first two to three customer interactions before reaching the human executive. After that, it allows them to offer the right kind of solution to the customer’s problem and help solve any issues without any follow-ups.
- Banking- 24% of the industry uses RPA
Improving Onboarding and KYC
While conducting KYC, bank officials often verify all the forms and documents one at a time. Therefore, the total number of applications they can process is pretty limited due to the human factor of time, effort, and accuracy. Furthermore, fatigue and tiredness over time can also lead to human error. With RPA implementation, you can reduce turnaround time for the KYC process as bots bring better repeatability and higher precision in operation without being tired.
Consequently, the RPA bot can further initiate the account opening process, welcome mail, and other related detail generation and intimation processes for the user both via mail and courier. This can help improve customer satisfaction and the overall onboarding process.
Accounts Payable and Closure Process
An OCR-enabled RPA solution helps increase the speed of the accounting process, enabling on-time invoicing, accurate bookkeeping, and quicker fund release. You can further set it up to ask the vendor for necessary documents in case of any complexity to release funds as per the bank norms.
Fraud Detection
With RPA and other checks, banks can automatically detect any anomalies in transactions and flag them against the customer. It can also help reduce the time for fraud detection and the time for fraud investigation.
- Customer Care- 20% adopted RPA
Data Exchange
While it may not seem so, customer care is a data-driven world where the data about the customers is drawn to generate insights to help serve them better. RPA can automate reading the data and generating insights from it to help you understand the key opportunity areas for any customer.
Accurate Customer Requirement Gathering
Amongst customer care staff, all customer queries are often handled by a limited number of people. The RPA bot can automatically perform the initial repetitive task of garnering customer information and critical problem areas, which helps the customer service exec serve the user better and save time and resources.
- Insurance- 38% of the industry uses RPA
Claim Processing
Depending on the type of insurance, the RPA can decrease the claims processing time by 75%. This faster time helps in improving overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Registrations
By utilizing RPAs, you can make the registration process 40% faster since the bots can automatically read and input data from the registration forms. This helps in faster registrations, which means improved customer satisfaction.
Risk Mitigation and Fraud Detection
Like the banking industry, RPAs can automatically detect abnormal and fraudulent transactions that can help mitigate risk for the institution.
- Healthcare – 30% of the industry uses RPA
Savings on Human Workforce
In many cases, healthcare workers are required to manually record and update patients’ data while ensuring the confidentiality of information. You can automate this through RPA, which can use character recognition to fill and save the requisite details of every patient with ease. It will help the healthcare workforce concentrate on their core activities of providing care to the patients.
Personalized Healthcare Plans
With the implementation of RPA, an extensive database of patients can be updated, created, and maintained. It can help in creating more personal healthcare for individuals by analyzing their medical history.
Through RPA, healthcare can deliver customized healthcare plans, remote assistance, automated follow-up, and simplify the appointment scheduling process.
- Manufacturing – 28% of the industry uses RPA
Generating and Utilizing Bill of Material (BOM) Reports
The BOM report needs careful time, cost, and effort consumption for every process carried out during manufacturing. Using an RPA, you can quickly generate a BOM report or streamline processes for manufacturing that allow the machine to understand what process to undertake and how long to create the final product.
ERP Automation
Managing available resources, planning resources, inventory, and accounts becomes more manageable with RPA since all the reports can be generated automatically and have actionable insights.
- Finance – 24% of the industry uses RPA
The world of finance can use the RPA for the following purposes:
Managing customer accounts
Generating reports
Data migration within accounts
Loan and mortgage data
Sending and receiving payments
Detection of financial anomalies
All processes are quickly deployable and scalable with RPAs, and the financial industry is catching up with the norm soon.
- Property Management: 45% Companies reducing costs by 20%
An RPA can automatically generate invoices, send them to the users, and even transact the payments received into the owner’s account regarding property management. You can also use it to improve the efficiency of business processes by reducing the turnaround time, leading to reduced costs of operation.
- Retail — 36% of the industry uses RPA
In the retail industry, RPA can be used for inventory monitoring, email sales, and data mining from competitor or manufacturer websites for critical information about products to serve customers better.
- Information Technology: 31% of the industry uses RPA
RPA has significant scope in the IT industry since it can handle all processes, from report generation to CRM updates to sending emails to large groups of people. Also, it can help reduce the turnaround time and increase the overall productivity of employees, which can help reduce costs and time for any business function.
It is expected that the RPA will become a universal attribute within the next five years, given its popularity and adoption rate of 21% as of June 2021. Hence, you should adopt it right now to experience the gains within the next three years.
This is all made possible by an RPA service provider. RPA service providers are firms that consult, implement, and manage automation projects for a company. The biggest RPA service providers in the world are:
- Contus
- Capgemini
- Accenture
- IBM
- Deloitte
- Infosys
- Symphony Ventures
- Cognizant
- Genpact
- Tech Mahindra
While these are the best ones out there, their services might not be affordable for the newer startups of today that operate on a linear model in the beginning. There are several criteria they should consider before choosing the right RPA service provider. They are:
Vendor Experience
The vendor’s experience dealing with companies in your domain or size is crucial to understanding how well the vendor can offer you an RPA solution.
Industry Readiness
The tech world changes constantly. Therefore, the vendor’s readiness to adapt to those industry changes and implement those within your industry is an important marker of their industry readiness.
Customer Support
How well can they provide customer support after the sales? What level of personalization can they offer for their products and their clients?
Product Training
How well they train the client to use the product and its associated features is an excellent marker in choosing a vendor. Take a few trial sessions to learn how their product training process works.
- Software Related Criteria
Ease of implementation
How easily you can use the RPA software across various processes and how fast it can start showing actionable and tangible results gives a measure of its ease of implementation.
Cost of Ownership
Does adding a new feature to the bot need you to spend extra money every time? Think about what it might cost in the long term before determining if the software is good for you.
Features on Offer
Finally, what features does the RPA offer the user is the biggest question that the software is going to be asked by the service provider?
Technical Compliances
Technical and other compliances are expected to be a forte for most RPAs. Therefore, if the software does not have all the technical compliance, think twice before using it.
- Other General Requirements
Speed and Scalability
RPA functions are made to be deployed quickly and to be scalable. If your RPA service provider cannot provide fast and scalable solutions, you should look at another RPA service provider.
Quality
The other requirements from the RPA service provider are the quality of the product and its features. For example, how do they maintain and update coding standards, shared utilities, and testing protocols to make the automation process easier? The higher the quality of all functions, the better chances of saving money and time.
Owing to the apparent benefits of cost savings, better productivity, and overall improved profits for the business, RPA is one of the best tools to adopt in the present day. Of course, it makes things easier, but it also helps reduce the overall turnaround time for ensuring customer satisfaction.
With the oncoming digital economy governed by Web 3.0, RPA serves as an excellent opportunity for brands to understand and align their processes for an improved customer-centric approach. Hence, if you want to generate more revenue at the same or reduced costs, RPA is the way to go in 2022.
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