Implementing RPA in business
RPA in business enables the creation of partnerships between robots and human workers, allowing humans to focus on what they can do best. Once RPA is implemented in an organization, the first question that surfaces is this: What will robots do and what will human workers do when their tasks are automated? Robots are best at handling tedious, repetitive, and high-volume tasks that are automated with a high efficiency and accuracy level. While robots take care of manual tasks, human workers can stop worrying about painful mundane activities and can instead focus on face-to-face discussions with people to develop strategic solutions to manage the business. In addition, human workers can focus on upskilling themselves to better fit management-level opportunities within the organization.
Someone may ask whether the introduction of RPA will cause them to lose their job. RPA is not a replacement for human workers. RPA only handles repetitive and mundane activities that people used to do before. As a result, the introduction of RPA eliminates some of the tasks that people did before, allowing people to have more free time to focus on strategic activities rather than repetitive operations. Although robots have AI to take care of specific actions, when it comes to strategic decisions, robots cannot replace the experience and complex reasoning abilities people have accumulated over many years.
Today, organizations in different industries have already implemented RPA to automate their processes. The following screenshot illustrates some of the functions already automated in other sectors:
Figure 1.1 – RPA examples in business
More processes are also suitable for automation in every industry, outside of what is included in the table shown in Figure 1.1.
The preceding list illustrates some of the most popular use cases for automation. Some of these processes are explained in detail next.
Payroll processing
Payroll is a typical process in any organization. Payroll refers to actions taken to keep track of employees' attendance and salary (or incentive payments), done every month. Payroll calculations are quite time-consuming as payroll is calculated based on different factors—for example, to derive the total monthly salary, the respective person should figure out the number of hours/days worked, number of paydays, taxes, bonuses, allowances, and more. Performing this check for each employee is complicated and highly manual.
Further, there are sometimes scenarios where employees do not correctly update their attendance. In such cases, the human resources (HR) representative has to contact them personally, either via email or a phone call, and request they update their attendance before performing this operation. RPA can automatically access HR applications or even manually maintained timesheets to capture the required information and complete payroll calculations. The process could also be further automated by automating actual bank transfers to transfer money to employee salary accounts.
Client information management
One of the main objectives of a company is to maintain a good client relationship. Maintaining a good relationship requires every record related to clients to be accessible in a central system, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) application. However, large-scale companies are spread across different geographies; hence, this makes it challenging to maintain a proper CRM system, and it requires a lot of data entry and frequent updates. Maintaining and updating such information in CRM applications is now performed by introducing RPA. Robots connected to various data sources capture the required information and easily update the CRM without any human intervention.
Invoice processing
Almost all organizations have to deal with documents, one of the most common types being invoices. Organizations receive invoices in different ways, such as soft copies or hard copies. Further, some of these invoices are handwritten, and some are computer-generated to add to the complexity. Data-entry operators have to extract the critical information from these invoices and update downstream applications to maintain financial records on time. Usually, organizations receive many invoices per day that require on-time data entry, verification from management, and system updates, all of which take many human hours. Introducing RPA to such processes provides many benefits in terms of data accuracy, efficiency, and reliability. Robots have the intelligence to extract the required critical information from invoices, perform verification based on a predefined set of rules, and update downstream applications with minimal human involvement.
Financial statement reconciliation
Financial statement reconciliation covers a significant portion of a finance team's operations, including matching orders, payments, losses, margins, and so on with internal accounts and financial statements that it receives at the end of the month. This is a very time-consuming task that involves many finance employees, as the accounts they work with go through a considerable number of transactions every day. To make sure financial statements are ready by the end of the month, the finance team works hard every day, completing and matching the financial statements of prior days to reduce the workload at the end of the month. Introducing RPA into such processes has shown a significant improvement. Robots can perform the same operation much faster and accurately for all reconciliations that the finance team manages.
Call center automation
Call centers perform a significant role in providing better and faster customer support to their valuable customers. Once a call center agent receives a customer call, they must perform initial checks to validate and recognize the customer before providing a service. Let's take the call center of a bank as an example. In that case, a customer may reach out for queries such as requesting account information, complaints about credit/debit card faults, enabling and disabling services, or something else. The call center agent must access multiple systems, retrieve the required information to perform initial validation, and provide the customer with an essential service. Performing the aforementioned actions takes time, and it takes attention away from the discussion the agent is having with the customer. The introduction of RPA to such processes allows a robot to understand the conversation between the two parties. Based on the understanding, the robot performs the required data retrieval from the systems. The robot finally shows the information onscreen automatically, allowing the agent to focus on the conversation to provide a better service.
Loan processing
Though banks and financial institutes use many software applications to perform their activities, some processes such as loan processing activities still require a lot of manual processing. Further, some financial organizations still use paper-based loan application forms. Once the customer fills out an application form and submits an application with any other required documents, the bank representative verifies the submitted data. The data verification usually includes validating the customer's personal information, cross-checking for other facilities obtained from other banks, repayment capabilities, and so on. Such checks are done by connecting to multiple external applications, which usually takes a long time. After the background checks, approval is carried out by the manager of the bank, based on specific criteria. The introduction of RPA for loan processing has brought a lot of benefits as most of these functions—such as reading the application form, performing background checks, calculating the grantable loan amount, and so on—are easily automated.
As well as the processes mentioned, there are many more exciting processes out in the world that robots take care of, allowing them to focus on more value-added activities.
Important Note
RPA in businesses allows employees to focus on more strategic initiatives while robots take care of transactional activities. This section of the chapter covered some of the commonly automated processes across multiple organizations around the world. Most business processes that require automation are complex and require many steps to be carried out. It is essential to understand all the activities that an RPA robot can perform to meet such complex business requirements. The simple actions performed by RPA robots sometimes require a combination of multiple technologies.