Robotic process automation enables business professionals to easily configure software robots to automate repetitive, routine work between multiple systems, filling in automation gaps to improve business processes.
“ Working as a virtual business assistant, bots complete tedious tasks, freeing up time for employees to concentrate on more engaging, revenue-generating tasks. Part of the beauty of robotic process automation technology is that it offers even non-technical employees the tools to configure their own software robots to solve automation challenges.”
The business benefits of RPA include:
Low technical barriers: Programming skills are not necessary to configure a software robot. As a primarily code-free technology, any non-technical staff can use a drag and drop process designer to set up a bot—or even record their own steps to automate a process through a process recorder feature.
Increased accuracy: Bots are extremely accurate and consistent – they are much less prone to making mistakes or typos than a human worker. This can apply to common processes such as provisioning or de-provisioning user accounts, copying information from one system to another, onboarding and off-boarding employees or populating a form based on information from another system.
Meet regulatory compliance standards: Bots only follow the instructions they have been configured to follow and provide an audit trail history for each step. Bots can also play back their past actions in case parts of a process need review. The controlled nature of bot work makes them suited to meeting even the strictest compliance standards.
No interruption of work: Operations can be performed 24/7 as software bots can work tirelessly and autonomously without requiring staff to manually trigger bots to initiate business processes.
Existing systems remain in place: Unlike traditional automation initiatives that may require extensive developer resources to integrate across multiple applications, RPA involves no disruption to underlying systems. Robots work across the presentation layer of existing applications just as a person does. This is especially useful for legacy systems, where APIs may not be immediately available, or in situations where organizations do not have the resources to develop a deep level of integration with existing applications.
Improved employee morale and employee experience: Employees will have more time to invest their talents in more engaging and strategic work. Bots enable workers to offload manual tasks like filling out forms, data entry and looking up information from websites, so workers can focus on strategic, revenue-producing activities.
Increased productivity: Process cycle times are more efficient and can be completed at a faster speed compared to manual processes.