In a time of global crisis, companies find themselves adapting to new circumstances while trying to maintain seamless operations amidst the disruption. Sebastian Schroetel, Vice President of Machine Learning & Intelligent Robotic Process Automation at SAP, explores the role of RPA – or Robotic Process Automation, and its potential to unlock business value if deployed well in our rapidly changing world.
In a time of global crisis, companies find themselves adapting to new circumstances while trying to maintain seamless operations amidst the disruption. Sebastian Schroetel, Vice President of Machine Learning & Intelligent Robotic Process Automation at SAP, explores the role of RPA – or Robotic Process Automation, and its potential to unlock business value if deployed well in our rapidly changing world.
The world relies heavily on task workers who don’t have many productivity and collaboration solutions or processes in place to help with the transition. The key to remote success for them is to turn to digitization to make operations, tasks, documents and all supporting needs digitally available. The problem is that this takes time, and task workers are in need of support quickly.Â
Within large enterprises that have many task workers, the availability of resources is just the first step toward an efficient remote environment that allows people to carry out their work. This can include frequently copying and pasting data from one application to another, or even manually re-entering information. While these tasks may seem tedious and mundane, they are important and take a lot of time to do, which can often lead to human errors. So how can tech help?
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What is RPA?
In a time that’s already stressful and challenging, let’s look toward technology to make everyday jobs more efficient. One technology available is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which implements “software robots†to automate tedious, manual tasks as much as possible. One example includes processing of unstructured information, whether it be speech or a scanned document.
While the benefits of RPA are significant to save time and resources, like any technology, there are implementation challenges to overcome. Many of these roadblocks are connected to the difficulties of artificial intelligence (AI), which are common in many enterprises and organizations. These challenges include lack of enterprise data integration, missing tools to gather complete data, insufficient amount of data or poor data quality for training machine learning (ML) models, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) limitations.
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How RPA Can Enable Business Value
Despite these challenges, RPA can create immense business value once the technology is properly adopted. The benefits of RPA include being quickly trained by operations personnel to handle repetitive tasks, offering contextual guidance in real-time, providing human workers with new step-by-step business processes, and enabling guaranteed compliance with company policies. This allows key workers to get back to the tasks that matter most and further enrich their operations.
How RPA can make a difference, especially in periods of disruption or high demand, was demonstrated by the Swiss cantons of Aargau and Zurich. The authorities were overwhelmed by the unusually large number of applications for reduced working hours compensation when lockdown began mid-March. In just two weeks, the implementation of a software bot to automate various steps in the payment process ensured that compensation reached applicants quickly. At the same time, the step massively reduced administrative workload.Â
The importance of intelligent RPA can be seen in other verticals of business and tasks as well. For example, when customers are experiencing their own set of unique challenges, it’s important for financial services companies to be available and on top of requests or concerns. Through RPA bots, financial services can automatically enter in enterprise resource planning (ERP) invoices received by email and direct customer needs that require more support to the right person. Similarly, as sales workers begin to rebuild their pipeline, it will be important to have processes in place that reduce manual entry time and cut costs. Sales teams can leverage RPA to automatically enter quotes, data, and numbers. This drives business value as it gives sales teams more time in the day to connect with customers one-on-one and reduces backend processes. Â
Additionally, there are many use cases involving scanned documents that have to be manually processed one by one. Processors have to retype the text or use standalone optical character recognition (OCR) tools to be able to copy and paste information from a pdf file into the system for further processing. Intelligent, cognitive automation employs such technologies as OCR to allow end-to-end automation where the processor can supervise and make decisions based on extracted and persisted information.Â
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The Future of RPA
The key to leveraging RPA is to have pre-built RPA bots ready, so users can rapidly automate core business processes without touching underlying systems that are already in place. This approach makes transitions for task workers much easier and more supportive. In today’s ever-evolving business world, RPA can offer improved operations, allowing workers to focus on tasks that drive value at a lower cost. Enabling process execution accuracy, speed, and efficiency is what will make the difference for workers and businesses as many look to rebuild and learn from business challenges stemming from the global health crisis. As the world continues to evolve with more people working remotely, many will turn to technology to ensure there is an abundance of productivity tools available so employees can get back to the heart of the business quicker and more efficiently.Â
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