What is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a relatively new phenomenon. It is an emerging form of business process automation. However, RPA is not a new term to those who keep up with the technological advancements taking place in the business world.
According to Professor Leslie Willcocks of the London School of Economics, RPA is a type of artificial intelligence worker. It is a software robot that simulates human activity in carrying out a task within a process. Willcocks affirms that RPA can do repetitive work faster, tirelessly and with more precision than humans.
Benefits of RPA Implementation in Your Business
There are a lot of potential benefits that you could get from using RPA. In fact, RPA may be the much-needed solution for your business. Some of the benefits that you could get from Robotic Process Automation are highlighted below:
1. Higher Productivity
RPA will help you get a lot manual tasks out of the way. It can take care of such things as project management, data entry, and supply chain management just to mention a few. When tasks are reduced, productivity increases. This is because your staff will be free to focus on higher value activities.
2. Improved Efficiency
Issues with efficiency can be solved by implementing RPA. With RPA, you can be able to get more output in lesser time, and deadlines will be met all the time. In addition, your outputs will have higher accuracy. All these are results of automation.
Moreover with robots, there will no longer be issues with attrition and retention. Language barrier is also totally alleviated. All of these will improve the efficiency of your business operations.
3. Better Compliance
All businesses are subject to some sort of legal compliance. It doesn’t matter the location, size or industry. In line with this, there are usually financial and operational consequences when there is a breach. A breach could result from non-compliance or when all regulations are not met.
With the use of RPA, you need not worry about compliance issues anymore. You only have to establish a process as an automated workflow with RPA. Once you do this, the robot will execute the process the same way all the time without any errors. This facilitates legal compliance.
4. Cost Reductions
According to reports of findings by Kinetic Consulting Services, a leading management consulting company, RPA can cut operation costs by as much as 90%. The findings also state that RPA implementation is about 50% cheaper than hiring an agent and costs just about 64% or hiring an Indian offshore worker. With these statistics, the financial benefits of RPA are astounding.
5. Improved HR Functions
RPA will reduce the complexities of managing HR functions. Firstly, there will be no more need for training; all you need is to establish an automated process. In addition, monitoring, supervision and governance will not be required, and there will be scalability and flexibility for resource direction.
Conclusion
When businesses adopt Robotic Process Automation, the employees will be able to maximize their strength. Humans can focus on such things as emotional intelligence, rational thinking, decision making, and customer interactions.
In addition, legal compliance and HR functions will be improved, and operational costs will be reduced. These are usually the areas where businesses face major challenges, and RPA is here to bring worthwhile solutions.