Did you know that 15 minutes of human work translates to less than one minute of a bot’s work! Also, bots come at a lower price than employing a physical workforce. They are more efficient, productive and reduce the risk and fault factor for a given task. All while elevating the quality, compliance, and uptime of an application.
Have you ever had to work at something really mundane and time-consuming? The same repetitive keystrokes on your keypad, the same pop-ups on your screen, the same dialog boxes that appear, and you start to wonder “why am I doing this when I could a lot more?” Well, you could! You could transform your work by employing RPA.
RPA, short for Robotic Process Automation is a software technology that allows manual and repetitive tasks to be automated. Unlike how the name sounds, it involves no robots, at least physically. RPA helps build personalized bots that can be deployed as software to suit a company’s niche or work culture. Such a bot can do tasks like navigating systems, executing the right keystrokes, identifying & extracting data, and all such tasks that humans do, but with more accuracy and at a faster pace.
This technology has been showing significant growth since 2016 and is continuing to exhibit better prospects for the future. Studies show that knowledge and work automation will have an economic impact of $5-7 trillion by 2025. It will have impacted more than 230 million knowledge workers, which makes up for around 9% of the global workforce.
Considering its concept and utility, some people might confuse it with artificial intelligence or at times, even with machine learning. This is an unfortunate misconception. Advanced bots at times apply AI and ML concepts but they are far from embodying those technologies as a whole. ML itself is a subset of AI and though this might seem surprising, bots built through RPA lack any intelligence of their own.
This might come as a realization upon pondering a while over the functioning of these bots; however, to break it down, these bots are built by humans so as to replicate certain human actions to carry out particular functions. Unlike how AI can take decisions in cases of anomalies or exceptions, RPA bots still have ways before they are optimized to that extent. Part of the reason for that lies in the requirements that process automation bots are meant to fulfill.
There are two types of automation that bots can be applied for – Process automation and cognitive automation. The former requires no intelligence from the bots. It is mainly Repetitive, manual, structured, and logical. However, the latter requires some decision-making from the bot’s side, though being repetitive and manual, it is also situational and decision-oriented. Such is the transformative aspect of RPA. It can be suited to a business’ standard. It is reliable to achieve simple tasks like moving files, extracting data, filling forms, etc., while also being capable to take up complex work processes like interpreting text, engaging in conversations, understanding unstructured data, or applying ML models.
All such factors and the many benefits it offers contribute to making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise softwares in the world. Its advantages like cost efficiency, higher accuracy, better compliance, boosted productivity and happier employees have helped RPA become a universally adopted software technology across varied businesses like banking, insurance, IT, customer support, operations, logistics, and more. Its scalable applications and minimal upfront investment allow even small and medium businesses to conveniently accommodate it. It also ensures a better return on investment for businesses.
After all that is said, there are a few challenges with RPA just like with any other technology. There are aspects that require scrupulous governance and human overseeing in a few RPA applications. They must be continuously monitored, coded, and recoded for optimal results. This can get tiring if there are too many bots to reconfigure each time. The main requirement that businesses need to keep in mind to accomplish successful robotic automation is to work in cognizance with IT professionals. RPA tech must be business-led and IT-supported. Also, managers must be trained to handle teams that are partially virtual and other implications that might arise thereupon.
Despite a few downsides which can be resolved with further optimization and future technical advances in the field, RPA is definitely a technology to be taken advantage of. It is easy to adapt and adopt to and it can help uncover massive potential that lies dormant in your workforce or business. Automation is the future and RPA is where you start! The best is yet to come.