What exactly is RPA? Why is it such a big deal? In this blog, I will help you through all these questions and, by the end of it, you will know everything you need to know about RPA.
Let us look at the topics we are going to cover today in this blog:
Watch this RPA Course video to learn more about its concepts.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic process automation is the process of automating business operations using robots (bots) in order to reduce human intervention. Confused? Don’t worry. I’ll clear all your doubts as we move along in this blog.
Let me explain RPA by breaking it down:
- Robotic: Involving a machine that mimics human actions
- Process: A step-by-step sequence that can complete a task
- Automation: Having no human intervention
Keeping this in mind, let us now define RPA.
Mimicking human actions to perform a sequence of steps without any human intervention is known as RPA.
How does RPA work?
Now that we know what RPA is, let us see how it works with the help of a simple example. Let’s say, a group of candidates has taken an aptitude test for a company that is hiring them. The hiring team enters the test scores into an Excel sheet, alongside the names of the candidates and their email IDs.
Now, imagine that email messages have to be sent to those candidates with a score above the cut-off, saying that they have been called for the next round of interviews.
Before the inception of RPA, these messages had to be sent manually to the candidates by the team. But now, RPA saves the team from this tedious work by extracting the data from the Excel sheet, comparing the candidates’ scores with the cut-off, and sending automated email messages to those who are eligible for the next interview round, all using just a handful of commands and a click. This way manual intervention is reduced at a large level.
Clearly, RPA is a technology. It is not a programming language or a tool. To implement this technology, we have a lot of tools. Let us discuss them in our next section.
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Why RPA?
In a business organization, there are a lot of repetitive tasks that are performed on a daily basis. All these redundant tasks that a human does on a regular basis can be replaced by a robot that works on RPA technology. It follows exactly the same steps that are defined by a human and complete the task without any human intervention.
This way, the time spent on doing these repetitive tasksby a user can be utilized to do some other important work.
For instance, at the data entry level, the data entry clerk visits the same source every day and gets the data from there and fills it, say, in an Excel sheet. This process has a set of defined steps, such as, visiting the website, extracting the data from there, and adding it to a sheet. But, if a robot can be trained to do this by just giving it a few simple commands, then why not, right?
The robot follows those commands and completes the work faster and more accurately.
This is just one of the millions of tasks RPA can do. Most organizations use RPA for end-to-end automation for everyday business operations.
Here are three major RPA tools that are widely used by business organizations across the world.
UiPath:
Year of birth : 2005
Learning platform: Has a community edition
Usability: Drag and drop and macro recording
Key Features:
- This is an open and extensible platform that features hundreds of built-in, customizable, and shareable activities.
- UiPath offers worldwide implementation support and a vast network of partner integrators.
- It has built-in OCR and deep learning to reduce maintenance.
Blue Prism:
Year of birth: 2001
Learning platform: No trial version available
Usability: Drag and drop
Key Features:
- This RPA tool provides access to the leading-edge cloud, artificial intelligence, and cognitive capabilities.
- It provides companies with flexible infrastructure choices since the application can run in both on-premise and cloud platforms like AWS.
- It provides a wide variety of languages to choose from, making it easy to access for people around the world.
Automation Anywhere:
Year of birth: 2003
Learning platform: Has a community edition
Usability: Drag and drop and macro recording
Key Features:
- This tool stands out with its best-in-class intelligent digital workforce which is suitable for most organizations across the globe.
- It combines the most complex RPA along with cognitive and analytical technologies.
- With its enterprise-grade technology, organizations can build smart bots for deploying in a wide variety of business fields.
Watch What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Tutorial
Benefits of RPA
RPA offers many benefits because of which it stood as the top automation technology and being used by many companies. So, the following are some top advantages of RPA:
- RPA improves productivity by reducing manual tedious work.
- By using RPA, companies can avoid errors and work more efficiently.
- There is no possibility of information leakage from one side to the other with Robotic Process Automation
- RPA also offers scalability which is crucial when your company is constantly growing.
- When there are no repetitive tasks, employees can work on providing the best customer service.
- RPA does not involve any complex automation.
- RPA implementation does not necessitate API configuration and requires little technological knowledge.
- It is less investment and great use.
Applications of RPA
From small firms to MNCs, RPA should be utilized by every company.
Majorly, right now, RPA is being heavily utilized in the banking and BPO sectors. Because most of the works in these domains are redundant.
Here are a few sectors where Automation Anywhere is used to automate end-to-end business operations.
Banks
Automation Anywhere is renowned for its horizontally sealed architecture where bank-grade security is paramount. It has relied upon more by banks and financial institutes than on any other RPA provider in the world with its best-in-class security.
Healthcare
The RPA tool, Automation Anywhere eases the administrative burden by automating and processing patient data, reporting work for doctors, bill processing, automating insurance data, claim status, and eligibility, and triggering emails from medical billing systems.
Government
As a secure digital workforce, Automation Anywhere can handle populating subcontractor forms, integrating legacy systems with new applications, verification processes, and automating daily reports.
Hiring Process
During the hiring process, this RPA tool automates the tasks of PeopleSoft (a company that provides Human Resource Management systems), email notifications, and populating.
Sales
In sales, Automation Anywhere is used for creating and printing invoices and for adding, deleting, updating, and editing the customer information into the customer relationship management (CRM).
Operations
In operations, Automation Anywhere is used to create accounts and set up the software, system integration, testing, etc.
These are just a few of its applications. Most industries rely on this Automation Anywhere RPA tool for their end-to-end automation.
Top Companies that use RPA
The following is the list of top companies that are using Robotic Process Automation.
- Walgreens entrusted the labor-intensive process of modernizing its HR and payroll systems to Blue Prism. Walgreens’ HR efficiency increased by 73 % thanks to Blue Prism.
- RPA has long been a part of Siemens’ digital strategy. Within a year of using RPA, the organization has increased productivity by automating 170 new procedures and saving 280,000 hours of labor.
- Blue Prism was used by World Hotels to automate hotel audits and deliver reports to the hotels and the WorldHotel account manager.
- According to Karla Younger, Vice President of HR Services at Coca-Cola, Blue Prism assisted us in time savings and increased efficiency also improved the customer experience by freeing up human resources to focus on issues that may affect consumers.
- Many more MNCs like Cognizant, Accenture, Walmart, Deloitte, IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, AT&T, and Tech Mahindra.
Future of RPA
Many major companies are already using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and there’s still a lot more that can be done with the technology to improve production, efficiency, and customer service. RPA can provide significant additional advantages to organizations, their clients, and their employees as it grows stronger in the upcoming years. By 2024, the RPA industry is forecasted to be worth around USD 8.75 billion.
In terms of jobs and career opportunities, a growing career like RPA will surely offer numerous opportunities in the future for professionals who are experts in Robotic Process Automation. According to Naukri.com, there are around 58,000+ RPA jobs available in India. So, this number is just going to increase in the future.
Conclusion
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an advanced technology that uses software robots or bots to automate repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming tasks. RPA is a form of business process automation that enables organizations to streamline their operations, reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve accuracy.
Unlike traditional automation solutions, RPA does not require extensive programming skills or complex integrations with legacy systems. Instead, RPA can be configured and deployed quickly, allowing organizations to achieve rapid ROI.
RPA has a wide range of applications across various industries, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and customer service. Some examples of processes that can be automated with RPA include data entry, invoice processing, report generation, and customer support.
Overall, RPA is a transformative technology that can help organizations improve their operational efficiency, reduce errors, and free up human workers to focus on more strategic and value-added tasks.