RPA is already revolutionizing business process automation and is automating mundane and recurring manual activities, enabling employees to focus on key activities and gain greater precision, speed and accuracy.
Automation is reshaping the jobs of human employees, who increasingly see software taking on rote, repetitive tasks. In fact, more than 40% of enterprises will create state-of-the-art digital workers by combining AI with robotic process automation (RPA), according to ForresterOpens a new window .
Today’s office workers spend too much time moving between different applications, often having to re-enter or copy and paste the same data – such as a customer’s name and address details – from one application to another to complete a specific task. RPA automates these mundane and recurring manual activities, enabling employees to focus on key activities and gain greater precision, speed and accuracy.
Using AI capabilities, RPA technology enables bots to process and understand unstructured data from e-mails, images and PDFs. Those same capabilities will enable intelligent bots to identify and learn new patterns without explicit training. Using conversational AI capabilities, also called chatbot services, bots can interact with customers and users in the same manner a person would.
This type of automation will drive success from the service desk while also creating better customer service. In fact, RPA is already revolutionizing business process automation.
Learn More: RPA: A Must-Have for Digital TransformationOpens a new window
Benefits of RPA
By the end of 2019Opens a new window , automation will eliminate 20% of all service desk interactions thanks to a successful combination of cognitive systems, RPA, and various chatbot technologies. RPA can be deployed across several industries – from finance to banking and utilities – to improve internal processes as well as customer service. Additionally, RPA provides organizations with the ability to reduce staffing costs and human errorOpens a new window . Here are some examples across a variety of industries:
1. Increased operational excellence and business process efficiency.
In Finance, an RPA bot automatically extracts Account Payable-related emails from an accountant’s mailbox, analyzes the PDF in the attachment using machine learning and then injects the extracted data into an ERP.
2. Enhanced customer experience through better, more personalized service.
An RPA bot can automate repetitive processes for banking employees, to help them discover if a customer is eligible for a loan and send personalized contracts in minutes.
3. Improved work experience for employees through contextual guidance.
In Utilities, an RPA bot can analyze data from several data silos across multiple systems (e.g. previous usage, contract details), before suggesting the ‘next best action’ for a customer service agent while on the phone with a customer.
4. Mitigated risk because of improved compliance.
In banking, RPA is used for accelerating eligibility checks (e.g. for a loan or credit) and guaranteeing the traceability of mandatory ‘Know Your Customer’ processes.
5. Reduced time to market for new offers through greater agility.
In the context of digital transformation, RPA allows users to rapidly set up a new online service or mobile app based on data stored in silos in the information system.
Learn More: The Key to Successful Automation Adoption in an EnterpriseOpens a new window
The Future of RPA
The evolution of Robotic Process Automation will be: more Intelligent, more Holistic, more Bottom-Up.
Intelligent RPA comes when artificial intelligence capabilities are introduced and AI has advanced rapidly in recent years. Huge amounts of data now available to train the models have enabled machine learning and deep learning algorithms to reach very high levels of confidence, beating the human brain in many cases. For the increasing number of business scenarios involving unstructured data such as images, text and speech, often coming from mobile devices, the answer is artificial intelligence. It has a myriad of potential uses, from recognizing and comparing images, to automatically classifying documents, extracting keywords and metadata from an invoice or a purchase order, converting speech into text to feed business systems or identifying the tone and the intention behind a customer e-mail to the service department. With Conversational AI, an RPA robot can act as a digital assistant that provides a high-quality service experience by handling a normal conversation, with questions and answers, instead of interacting with a user via a regular UI.
Intelligent Process Automation comes when taking a broader view to what process automation implies. Business Process Management (BPM) has been around for years. BPM provides process documentation from enterprise architecture to describe value and process flows and implement blueprints. It also automates structured processes while RPA helps run repetitive rule-based and user interface focused tasks. BPM and RPA are fully complementary and can be integrated seamlessly: a BPM workflow can trigger RPA bots and vice versa. RPA can be used as middleware to gather data from core systems or external websites and feed BPM. RPA and BPM together are helping organizations make significant advances to be better positioned to reap the rewards of a digital workplace.
Last but not least, the future of RPA also relies on its day-do-day users. RPA is becoming more and more democratized and there will be more and more community-driven automation content, as well as automation tools to support the “citizen developer.†At SAP for example, 27,000 offer letters are sent out each year to new and existing employees. Creating those letters was a very time-consuming task due to multiple country-specific rules, with many manual steps. SAP HR, helped by SAP IT, developed an RPA bot called Lucy. Lucy is now able to generate an employment contract including all legally-required attachments in less than a minute. Lucy allows HR employees to focus on talent search, and to meet service-level agreements even during periods of peak activity.
In conclusion, Intelligent Process Automation will soon deliver unprecedented levels of business speed and efficiency – and this is just the beginning.