What can RPA automate?
As we discussed in the previous sections, RPA robots can mimic human interactions in a digital platform. Listed here are some of the very few actions that RPA robots can manage:
- Automated reading, sending emails and attachments
- Logging in to web and enterprise applications
- Moving files and folders
- Copying and pasting data
- Filling out forms in web/desktop applications
- Reading and writing data into databases
- Reporting across multiple systems
- Scraping data from the web
- Internet of Things (IoT) data collection and analysis
- Performing simple-to-complex calculations
- Extracting data from scanned and computer-generated documents that are structured or semi-structured
- Collecting social media statistics and performing different analytics on them
- Automated customer service
- Standard letter writing
Given the technological advancements and the expansion of RPA robots' capabilities, robots could perform many more functionalities other than those seen in the preceding list. Today, new technological improvements have taken RPA to another level, known as hyperautomation. The concept of hyperautomation covers many more functions such as AI skills, ML, long-running workflows, process mining, native integrations, and advanced analytics.
The use of RPA with AI capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP), ICR, optical character recognition (OCR), and AI computer vision enables robots to perform more advanced and complex tasks. The use of AI also allows robots to learn by themselves through ML. The ability to train robots over time helps improve their accuracy and reliability. Further, with the concept of long-running workflows, robots can work on more diverse business scenarios, with humans interacting with the robots at specific decision points seamlessly without worrying about what is happening before and after the decision point.
We, as humans, interact with software applications by simple mouse or keyboard actions. However, we perform these steps in different environments such as our desktop or laptop computers and remote or virtual machines (VMs). Today's technology has allowed RPA robots to mimic the same actions with higher precision, irrespective of the environment in which they are working. All activities performed by robots require monitoring to ensure the best utilization of the digital workforce. Also, monitoring allows administrators to track and monitor execution times and failures and track the idle times of robots. Today's data analytics power provides precise tracking and analysis of such data to calculate the return on investment (ROI), utilization, robot idle times, and so on. Hyperautomation is a concept that not only covers the development and monitoring of robots but also enables organizations to precisely monitor and analyze the business process itself. Business process mining is a concept that hyperautomation offers to explore the process and identify the nature of the process, exceptions, different methods of performing the procedure, steps carried out, bottlenecks, and automation possibilities.
RPA today is not just one technology—it is a combination of multiple technologies such as AI, ML, NLP, ICR, and much more. The combination allows RPA robots to perform various simple-to-complex activities without human intervention. RPA has to be applied wisely to business processes, and there are many factors to consider to identify a business process for automation.