Robotic Process Automation

How Robotic Process Automation is shaping business automation

With constant pressure to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, many organisations are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) as a solution.

RPA enables organisations to automate business processes at a fraction of the cost and time, freeing up employees from doing repetitive and routine tasks.

What is robotic process automation?

RPA is technology that can automate business processes that are rules-based, structured and repetitive. A company can use RPA tools to communicate with other digital systems, capture data, retrieve information, process a transaction and more. Consider RPA “robots” that are programmed to complete specific business processes.

Robotic process automation can extract data from documents, organise files and folders, scrape web pages and more. An RPA system eliminates the chance of human error and reduces staffing costs.

Robotic Process Automation

What are the types of processes that can be automated?

Robotic Process Automation is well suited for processes that are clearly defined and well documented, repeatable without many changes and also if they are rules-based. This helps organisations across numerous industries automate a wide variety of tasks, below are examples to help you understand how effective RPA can be.

RPA software is perfect for data that needs to be collected or scraped off websites – for example, stock trading websites, futures trading websites, commodities trading websites, news and media sites (based on keywords). These websites can comfortably be scraped for the specific information of interest, summarised and later presented to the required stakeholders for a call on what to do next with this information.

Pulling data from multiple websites to find the best deal

Whether you’re looking to travel or purchase a vehicle, you want to get the best deal, and RPA tech can help make it happen by scraping data off websites, comparing it and showing you the best deal.

Advantages of web scraping with Robotic Process Automation

  • Lesser errors and cost
  • Customized scraping
  • Faster setup
  • Gathers social media data
  • Automates batch download tasks
  • No need to maintain a team for scraping
  • Easy and faster setup

Orders placed on many of the e-commerce websites may then have to be placed on the actual repositories for dispatch and to maintain the inventory recordings. Such data  processes can be handed over to an RPA solution, the whole process of order placement will be automated start to finish.

Advantages of customer order processing with Robotic Process Automation

  • Improved customer experience
  • Eliminates manual entry time
  • Improves data control
  • Reduces costs
  • High flexibility
  • Improved ROI

If you are a support organisation that receives thousands of emails that need responses, an RPA can look after them for you. Common issues or emails can be segregated to groups and responses to such emails can be given by the RPA solution whereas the critical ones which are not ascertained into a group can be handled by the respective personnel.

Advantages of automating email query processing:  

  • Increases scale and scope of email campaigns
  • Boosts ROI on staff costs
  • Empowers your team to get better results
  • Increases average order value
  • Improves customer lifetime value
  • Gives space for strategic thinking

Employees are often required to pull relevant information from legacy systems in order to have the data available for newer systems. RPA can support this manual process and complete it without introducing human error. When paper forms need to be transferred to digital, an RPA solution can read the forms and then get the data into the system freeing up humans to do other things.

Benefits of Automating data transfers between the systems

  • Saves administration hours
  • Reduces the possibility of human errors
  • Eliminates delays and bottlenecks due to manual process
  • Streamlines the data transfer process and help in conserving the resources
  • Level up’s transparency and control with automated reporting.

Many of the customer requests received by call centres can be supported with RPA technology; common customer queries and solutions can be provided to agents via a dashboard. When an issue gets escalated to human customer service agents, RPA can help consolidate all the information about a customer on a single screen, so the agents have all the information they need from multiple systems to provide exemplary service.

Advantages of RPA implementation: 

  • Shorter average call duration
  • Reduces the errors to a maximum extent
  • Improved communication
  • Optimal use of resources
  • Automated responses and triggers.

An RPA solution can be used to extract important information from time sheets and other inputs. With this data, the RPA tool automatically calculates an employee’s pay and then carries out the necessary bank transactions too. Added complications like expenses, bonuses and holiday pay can be easily factored in as well.

Payslips are generated automatically and accurately, eliminating the need for someone to do this manually. The whole process takes less time and the lack of errors ensures there are no compliance issues to worry about.

Advantages of Payroll automation: 

  • Generates accurate payslips
  • Payroll calculation and deductions at a faster rate
  • Generate accurate payslips
  • Calculate expenses,  bonuses, holiday pay, etc, with minimum efforts
  • Reduces the burden of compliance
  • Eliminates the need to understand complex tax legislation
  • Stores and organizes the data related to payslips and annual reports in an easily accessible and secure way.

Many organisations have to process forms for any initial process to trigger in their system, which also forms the paper-based proof that can be saved for further use in investigations. Processes like these can be automated where the forms can be read by a RPA solution and then the manual data entry to the applications where these forms are processed, can be done by the RPA solution.

Advantages of Forms Automation: 

  • Reduced costs
  • Improved productivity
  • Fast Processing
  • Remote access
  • Reduced paper cost and storage
  • Checklist Automation
  • Enhanced auditing

Many of the insurance companies have to process claims that are raised against insured members for any initial process to trigger claims processing in their system and which also forms the paper-based proof that can be saved for further use in investigations. Processes like these can be automated so that the forms can be read by a RPA solution and then the manual data entry to the applications where these claims are processed, can be done by the RPA solution.

Requests like statement reconciliation is a very regular and a common request that an individual or organisation might have in the Banking or Insurance sector. These kinds of requests are well handled by the RPA software robots.

Advantages of Automating Account Reconciliation process 

  • Reduce duplicate payments
  • Improve efficiency
  • Saves time in manually verifying your bank statements.
  • Enhance the speed of the processes.
  • Provides enough time for the finance team to concentrate on key account payable tasks

Banks can appoint RPA software robots to take up the complete responsibility of initiating a credit card application, to gather all the required documents from the individuals, make the necessary credit checks, background checks on itself, decision making whether or not an individual is eligible for a credit card based on the details that are provided in the step earlier, issue a new card if they are eligible and on successful delivery of the card the case can be closed. The whole process is so systematic that this can be easily handed to the RPA software robots comfortably.

Advantages of Automating Credit Card Applications

  • Improves employee productivity
  • Anywhere anytime access to online documents
  • Availability of efficient methods to crosscheck operational metrics for process excellence
  • Reduce turnaround time
  • High customer satisfaction

Hospitals surface a huge number of patients coming on a daily basis to get their health issues resolved, but having those patient registrations in manually will cause a lot of confusion when the same patient keeps coming for various other health issues. Hospitals can’t waste their resources on keeping track of these details on a manual basis for a long time, hence such patient registrations can be done by the RPA software robots which have all the information required for them to guide the patients who turn up at the Hospitals for their treatment. These software robots can be monitored for ensuring the process being followed in the right manner.

Online scheduling of patients for healthcare appointments can be enhanced with RPA technology. Bots can gather all patient details such as insurance information, appointment request, location preferences and more to make appointment scheduling more efficient.

Advantages of Automation in Patient Registration

  • Reduce errors in registrations
  • Labour savings
  • Improved consistency and quality
  • Enhanced throughput

Onboarding into organisations requires a certain process to be followed. This process can be fully automated with the RPA based software robots to ensure that the required details are provided to the new individuals who joins and also get the needed information from them to safeguard a smooth onboarding process for the new employee.

Onboarding automation benefits

  • Saves a lot of time and money
  • Data collection becomes more efficient
  • No possibility to commit errors
  • Enhanced security for storing employee data while onboarding

Customer complaints that are logged can be put against a present set of issues and each of the newer issues that get raised can be categorised into these issue categories by the RPA based software robots. Based on each of these categories, there can be possible solutions that can be suggested to the customers right away. Doing so, the customer complaints can be answered 24 x 7 instead of 8 hours a day and only 5 days a week.

Benefits of customer complaints processing automation: 

  • Streamline your process
  • Lowers operating costs
  • Swift checkout
  • Increases revenue
  • Enhances customer retention rate

Data cleansing is a good example where unwanted details and data can be classified and rules are laid out on what classifies to be bad data. Once the bad data is identified, this can be automatically cleansed by the RPA based software robots instead of human beings sitting for hours to do that which can get frustrating given the volumes of data that has to be handled on a daily basis.

Advantages of automating data cleansing process.  

  • Increased revenue
  • Increased productivity
  • Better business decisions
  • Saves a lot of time

Customer orders can be fulfilled without any human intervention. RPA based software robots can take up the whole process of handling these orders and systematically update each order once done.

Advantages of implementing automation in Order Processing:

  • Eliminates manual entry time
  • Eliminates errors in order processing
  • Reduces your accounting costs
  • Improved data control
  • Faster shipping
  • Process order from anywhere

Any sales division would tell you, time that should be spent building relationships is instead used on administrative tasks such as updating the customer relationship management (CRM) system, setting up the client in the billing system, and inputting data into sales metrics and monitoring systems. Robotic process automation can be used to streamline each of these activities.

Hopefully these examples will give you an idea of how RPA is used in practice today and shows the enormous potential of this technology for any business. If you’re interested in the benefits of RPA and you’ve identified processes at your business that could be automated to improve efficiency please get in contact with ABM to start your journey to robotic process automation.

Contact Us Here
Supporting a local dealer

Supporting a local dealer

See the advantages of supporting a local dealer - you are not only contributing to the community, economy and locally employed staff, you are receiving a more personalised service with immediate access to a support team and management.

Managed Law Software & Print Solution

Managed Law Software & Print Solution - Meet your deadlines, budgets, and confidentiality requirements with protected, client-chargeable printing.
Medical Print Solution

Medical Print Solution

A medical print solution that supplies appropriate device/s, fully installed & supported, with a single point of contact from sales, consumables, service & accounts.