The Rise of Robotics Process Automation

Robotics Process Automation has become an important part of businesses over the last decade and is now being used for doing business with ease. It has the potential to transform today's workplace as dramatically as the machines of the industrial revolution changed the factory floor. Robotics Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence have the potential to make business process smarter and more efficient and have significant advantages over the traditional way of doing business.

It is best suited for processes with repeatable, predictable interactions with IT applications. Robotics process automation software performs routine business processes by imitating the way people interact with applications through a user interface and following simple rules to make decisions. With the help of this software, an entire end to end process can be performed with a little bit of human interaction. Any organization can maximize the impact of robot led automation with the appropriate understanding of the available tools and a clearly defined strategy for automating their enterprises. This technique helps in improving efficient use of the resources by combining cloud-based bots, and a proven approach to enable redeployment of employees, adding more value to customers, businesses, and investors.

Some of the advantages of Robotic Process Automation are:

•  Flexibility and scalability

•  Improved accuracy

•  Improved employee morale

•  Decreased cycle times and improved throughput

•  Detailed data capture

Robotics Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data can be used to form intelligent automation solutions that either directly assist people in the performance of non-routine tasks or automate those tasks entirely.

Organisations are leveraging intelligent automation in a number of ways:

•   Wealth management firms are using intelligent automation to review and analyze portfolio data, determine meaningful metrics, and generate natural-language reports for their customers on the performance of each of their funds.

•   Global banks are leveraging intelligent automation to improve their regulatory compliance processes by monitoring all electronic communications of employees for indicators of noncompliant activities.

•   Insurers are using it to answer the queries of potential customers in real-time and increase sales conversion rates.

The uses of intelligent automation are potentially limitless. They are also more expensive and take longer to implement as compared to robotic process automation tools. Unlike Robotics Process Automation tools, which can be broadly applied, intelligent automation solutions require more extensive configuration and use of machine learning that is specific to a much narrower business purpose and the complex scenarios it may encounter.

Uses of Robotics Process Automation

C-level executives are responsible for making sure business outcomes are achieved and new governance policies are adhered to when 'bots' replace humans across departments. This helps in measuring and managing of business outcomes of relevant department heads. Robotics Process Automation is another area that is requiring the CTO/CIO to move further into a business operations leadership role, taking on more accountability for business outcomes and risks of deploying such technologies.

Conclusion

Automating a bad process still gives a bad outcome and there is a risk that we rush to deploy these technologies without fully appreciating the criticality of the human cognitive to business success as well as human happiness. So, we cannot rely on Robotics Process Automation alone, human interference is also important because robots can't take all the decisions. This can only work with routine work in which outcome is predictable. It requires extensive human guidance as it only works what is assigned.