Prince Kohli, CTO of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software developer Automation Anywhere, explains how RPA can transform ERP performance outcomes, and unlock tremendous value for enterprises.
Let’s face it. As the world faces off with a global pandemic, ERP has become an enabler to help businesses continue to survive. Organizations that were reluctant to abandon their age-old ERP systems have found themselves glad that they’ve held off – now seeing this technology as a source of proactive insight that can offer the visibility to plan for tomorrow.
While they have proven themselves over time, a huge amount of work has been put into customizing ERP systems for specific business needs as most ERP systems require large amounts of manual work on a daily basis. For example, a recent study found that 51 percent of companies with ERP systemsOpens a new window had to use manual extraction and transformation if they wanted to reuse ERP data. And, in an interesting twist, most companies take that for granted – meaning that they have assumed that this participation must always be manual, using humans as bridges between applications or as part of processes.
Similar statistics point to the frustration with ERP installationsOpens a new window and often with legacy systems. This usually arises due to their perceived inflexibility as they require custom-coded modifications to address changing business needs. Also, while they contain large amounts of business-critical data, this data is typically siloed and difficult to extract. Data entry itself into ERP systems is a manual process that consumes hours of many employees’ workdays. Besides being laborious and inefficient, it can be highly error-prone.
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The RPA Opportunity
Robotic process automationOpens a new window (RPA) is an intelligent automation technology that is ideal to address the inefficiency problems that are inherent in most ERP systems. The software “bots†created by an RPA platform perform the same functions as human beings would, but substantially faster and with a near zero-error rate. They can operate 24/7 or trigger automatically as needed. They scale up or down, work across any number of systems, and can automatically handle even data or system anomalies and auto-correct. And, possibly most importantly for IT, they significantly enhance but in no way impact existing systems.
From a technical perspective, RPA works best on processes that have the following characteristics:
- Rules-based, where human judgment involved is small or predictable with a reasonable degree of confidence
- Repetitive
- Stable, i.e., not subject to frequent changes
From a business perspective, the most likely candidates for intelligent automation are those where efficiency, speed, or scale are the most important metrics or where error rates are currently too high, or any errors are costly. Examples of common processes often identified as candidates for RPA include various back office and front office tasks such as sales order and invoice processing, employee onboarding, intelligent data handling and transfers, customer-facing processes, managing physical or digital systems (automating building infrastructure for example) or even contact tracing – but these are only a few out of literally limitless opportunities where intelligent automation can play a critical role.
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Implementation Choices
There are two basic approaches to implementing RPAOpens a new window , and which one is the right one will depend heavily on a company’s corporate culture and strategic objectives.
The first is to empower employees to automate business processes that fill up their days with tedious work and keep them from attending to higher-value tasks. The best RPA platforms are specifically designed for non-technical people who have no exposure or knowledge of software programming. With these platforms, with as little as one or two hours of training, employees can build their own bots. They diagram the process they want to automate, and the code is automatically generated.
Another employee-centered approach enables users to “record†(or follow) a process instead of diagramming it, again with automatic code generation to create the software bot. In both cases, these bottom-up approaches to RPA Opens a new window are virtually risk-free, as they don’t involve changes to any of the existing ERP or other systems.
Artificial intelligenceOpens a new window (AI) capabilities are available for companies that prefer a top-down approach. These tools can observe human behavior and automatically discover processes for one person or across one or more teams that are good candidates for automation. They can even rank these processes in terms of the potential ROI that any given software bot would likely deliver. Finally, with no other IT intervention beyond approval, they can generate the required code with one mouse click.
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ROI in Months
ERP systemsOpens a new window are going to play a major role in corporate IT for the foreseeable future, and the use of RPA to eliminate ERP inefficiencies or gain advantages that were not imagined before represents a huge opportunity for IT departments. In addition to improving efficiency, bots can free employees to make better use of their time and even boost morale – often with ROI in only a few months.
Given the high reward with little risk, RPAOpens a new window deserves more IT attention now.
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