Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is one of the fastest-growing technologies today. According to UiPath, 1 in 10 startups will have a higher digital workforce by 2023.
By leveraging this software technology, organizations can handle repetitive business processes. The technology emulates human actions and allows software robots to perform various tasks, navigate systems & processes, complete functions, and manage data.
Essentially, RPA not only automates all the redundant tasks but does it faster and with more consistency & efficiency. Thus, choosing to automate your business processes with RPA can help you accelerate your business growth more effectively than ever. So what can you automate with RPA?
You can automate a multitude of business processes. However, you must choose the right business processes to automate. Make sure that the business process you are trying to automate with RPA meets the criteria given below:
- Processes with high transaction volume, repetitive operation, and high frequency
- Processes that are rule-based & standardized, their decision making depending on predictive rules.
- Processes that are stable & documented
- Processes that can save costs with automation & enhance the scope of high ROI
Business processes with these characteristics are ideal for automation with RPA. The functions themselves can be both back-office & front-office operations. We have listed some of the most critical business operations suitable for RPA-led automation.
- Invoice Processing
Sending & receiving invoices is a common task for both enterprise & small-sized businesses. Although it is critical for all businesses, invoice processing is not without its challenges.
For instance, different vendors often submit their invoices in different formats, including email, fax, paper copy, PDF, etc. This disrupts the overall workflow of the financial analysts as they need to transfer the data manually, which is not only time-consuming but also exceptionally error-prone.
By implementing RPA, both big & small organizations can overcome this challenge, regardless of the volume of the invoices and their formats. The software robots can automatically process invoices, automate data input, error reconciliation, and make decisions- end-to-end automation results in minimal human intervention and reduced errors and the overall time used.
Zurich Insurance, Guardian Group, and Bancolumbia are some of the leading organizations that have used RPA for financial processing.
2. Sales Operations
Sales are one of the most critical parts of any business and involve a lot of repetitive tasks, including consistent data entry, accounting updates, and so on. Maintaining data consistency requires a considerable amount of time and manual effort.
For example, the sales representatives spend hours entering data into the ERP & CRM systems, while financial and accounting analysts replicate the same data for another system. As a result, errors, data duplication, and lack of consistency become feasible alongside productivity and performance.
But using software robots to operate sales activities from the beginning to the end can simplify these tasks while reducing employee-dependent time-consuming tasks and eliminating errors. Thus, implementing RPA to automate sales orders, invoicing, fulfillment, etc., can enable your sales teams to focus on their primary goal – prospecting new customers & increasing sales.
3. Customer Service
The quality & speed of customer service can make or break businesses. Hence, it is important to constantly focus on finding new ways to accelerate customer service and enhance customer experience. Despite that, companies often overlook the scope of automation in delivering customer service.
Using RPA to automate certain operations in customer service can facilitate better interactions. For example, since modern-day customers want faster responses, organizations can leverage automated customer care systems to sort customer queries and offer initial responses quickly.
RPA can also help your organization manage queries by categorizing them based on departments, enabling easier & faster access to the relevant agents in the least possible time. This approach will thus eliminate the human-led process of transferring customer calls & queries from one executive to another, saving both time & effort on both ends. Other than these, you can easily automate many rules-based processes involved in customer service with RPA.
Giants, including Deutsche Bank, Walmart, Virgin Trains, and American Express, have leveraged RPA to enhance customer service.
4. Price Comparison
Whether you are a manufacturing enterprise or a service provider, all types of businesses need to make bulk purchases from time to time. These purchases not only impact the immediate finances of the organization but also impact the long-term revenue/profit of the company. So, research & price comparison become essential before making any decision regarding each purchase. This takes up a significant amount of time and effort, which can be invested in more interactive functions.
Automating product & price comparison with RPA brings decision-making to a new level. It compares product prices, attributes, quality, compatibility, and vendor reliability to ensure that you invest in the best resources at the lowest prices.
5. ERP Data Entry
ERP data entries are perhaps the most time-consuming & tiring. No matter the size or type of your business, it is likely that your business analysts across different departments are spending a good portion of the day entering business-critical data into your integrated ERP or enterprise resource planning system.
While it may sound easy, collecting data from many sources and entering the correct data is exceptionally challenging, risky & time-consuming. A small manual error while data entry can cause a ripple effect throughout the ERP workflow, disrupting the processes & causing serious inefficiencies.
With RPA, these risks are significantly reduced. Organizations can effortlessly automate the end-to-end workflow of ERP data entries, including gathering & logging data, updating applications, processing the logged data, and validating it. Using RPA to automate ERP data entries can reduce transaction time on one hand and enhance productivity. The lack of human intervention further ensures that all possibilities of errors are eliminated.
6. Accounting Reconciliation
One of the most critical responsibilities of the accounting department of any organization is reconciliation, which compares different sets of documents to verify financial records & balances.
However, reconciliation can be a tedious task since the documents involved are gathered from varied sources and in different formats. This inconsistency in the documents requires thorough manual supervision to ensure reliable verification. However, being heavily manual, there’s a huge risk of errors.
Your organization can use RPA to automate data extraction to secure optimum reliability, ensuring complete accuracy. The software robots can gather data from a wide range of sources, including bank statements & bills to compare & reconcile orders with delivery notes. This minimizes the risk of inaccuracies and helps maintain the financial order of the organization more effectively.
7. Payroll
Payroll is one of the most manual-driven, time-consuming, rule-based, and repetitive processes involving large volumes of data entry. Highly reliant on manual efforts, payroll management presents an astonishing amount of challenges corresponding to the standardization of processes. It involves the fulfillment of local statutory and compliance requirements, but it also runs the risk of data inaccuracies, potentially delaying salary payments.
Automating payment processing in payroll management can eliminate these issues. When RPA is used, it carries out all the payroll operations in a streamlined & systematic way – verifying employee data, validating records, optimizing earnings & deductions, and automating the creation of paychecks & reimbursements.
8. Recruitment
RPA can also help automate the entire recruitment process, streamlining functions including sourcing resumes, eliminating spam, generating assessments, etc. In fact, more than 90% of critical recruitment operations like candidate screening, assessing, measuring, and onboarding can be automated with RPA.
Automation can help HR teams reduce the volume of repetitive manual tasks like resume vetting, candidate shortlisting, and scheduling of interviews. It helps them make informed decisions and carry out more thorough assessments of each recruitment prospect.
9. Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding presents a challenging process at a whole new level, apart from recruitment. The process involves a multitude of transactions, beginning with setting up new user accounts & email addresses and going as far as enterprise training. This wide plethora of activities naturally becomes too labor-intensive and overwhelming for HR & IT teams. It leads to delays, and also impacts productivity & incurs overhead expenses. Not only that but ensuring a smooth employee onboarding can take up a lot of time.
Thankfully, being rule-based, you can easily automate employee onboarding tasks with RPA. Leveraging RPA can automatically orchestrate a pre-defined onboarding workflow depending on the rules & triggers assigned to the new user accounts of the new hires, thereby reducing the overall time, labor & costs.
Your Business Need RPA
RPA, when implemented for the right processes, can deliver interesting results & contribute significantly to the overall performance, productivity & profitability of your organization. A report by Gartner suggests that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyper-automation technologies.
The best part about automating business processes using RPA is that the technology suits almost all business types & sizes, thus barely posing any limitations even if your business is small scale.
RPA from Signity Solutions caters to your organization’s specific digital objectives. Our RPA experts help you implement the technology across front-office & back-office operations and core & cross functions. Through our end-to-end RPA development services encompassing RPA consulting, automation design, implementation, robotic desktop automation, support & maintenance, Signity enables you to speed up your RPA journey. With Signity, your organization can enjoy the scope of scalability & growth for the future, making sure that it fits your business from the start to the end.
Author
.Author Name- Megha V.
Author Bio- I am a Creative diginative who spends too much time on social media — interested in combining technology and creativity with my blogs – loving all things nerdy. Minimalistic design, organizing great events, and constant learning excite me.
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