Robotic Process Automation enhance any company’s routines, period, it naturally eliminates inefficiencies and risks overtime. These type of automation absorves activities that don’t need human decision making. Issues that can be solved through simple and straight foward activities based on rules. It can trigger responses, distribute information, input data in a precise way that never fail or make mistakes. Is that good or not? So let’s dive deeper and undestand more about robotic process automation in corporate scenarios.
In this post you will learn about:
- What is Robotic Process Automation in a nutshell?
- How RPA works?
- What can Robotic Process Automation do?
- Eliminating inefficiencies with RPA
- When to use it?
- How to create automation strategies?
- Auditing process automation
What is Robotic Process Automation in a nutshell?
Robotic Process Automation is a term used to describe automated softwares that performs “digital” activities. It takes over repetitive tasks based on business rules so that people can focus on decision making issues. RPA can also collect data from various sources like websites and applications to fill or start other softwares and systems.
Animação de 3 robôs interligados com o texto abaixo de cada robô
- robo: Capture data + Rule validation
- robo: Record in databases + Share information
- robo: Notify interested parties + analytics
How RPA works?
RPA is not an actual robot but a software that access data from IT systems. It can integrate applications, transfer data, connect databases or access web services in the back-end of your process. Basically, it automates repetitive digital interactions as it was a human clicking and typing in a software, it can open email attachments, fill e-forms, record data and other boring tasks that needs no judgement or thinking.
What can Robotic Process Automation do?
It depends on your company’s market practices and daily routines, but in general, the topics below are used by this type of automations:
- Create repetitive tasks
- Capture Content
- Structure Data
- Browsing throughout web systems
- Integration different systems
- Send and receive e-mails
- Supply various softwares with data
- Streamline auditing processes
Eliminating inefficiencies with RPA
It’s important to notice that these automations features are simply streamlining human manual tasks. Thus, if a process is already inefficient the automation will only automate it. So the real inefficiency lies within the processes activities and how they are structured to provide added value to the system. Here some cases where automation can be beneficial to your business;
Integration across legacy systems: old systems that carry out billing processes are hard to change, so automations can be used to create layers of interactions between old and new environments.
Customer experience: chatbots, for example, can ease up the first steps of customer services, capturing basic data to assign the appropriate team.
Compliance control and assessment: business rules are key maintain quality across systems. It reduces risks caused by the people’s inattention. Automation assures compliance consistently over all activities.
Governance features: the constant system monitoring can inform managers and coordinators ahead about detours of results, this way it can facilitate the initiation of corrective action plans.
Even tho robotic process automation has its limitations, it is undoubtly certain that they play a crucial role in reducing inefficiencies. Once you understand where lies your company automations, evaluate the collected data for insights about flaws or risks in the system.
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When to use it?
RPA is more often used to personalize the user experience and take control of recurring tasks. When the company falls into a certain tier of service it can generate a overwellming flow of data. This means that teams are being overloaded in little tasks. Thus, when you notice this issue it is time to start looking for a RPA solution.
However, some processes may need human intervention for decision making, reasoning and judgment. Assess the business processes that have more impact in your costs and the ones which most interact with consumers. Then evaluate where the human must take place to think and make decision that matter to the issue. This way you can only implement RPA in places that are more prone to recurring decisions and answers.
How to create automation strategies?
Create business rules is one thing but automating companies is an everchanging challenge in the market. In ones department automation can work but in the next one it might not. So how can we manage these issues across the company? Firstly, you must understand how RPA impact the tiers of your company:
CRIAR UMA TABELA COM OS TÓPICOS ABAIXOS
| Strategy | Does it impact the strategic plan more broadly? | Assess the impact of the RPA on the planning like; cost center distribution, team rearrangement, market investments and asset maintenance. |
| Tactics | Are your executives putting RPA in their planning? | How are they managing and foreseeing their project within RPA features. Most of the time overwhelming data can shadow potential improvements. People often thinks that once an automation is implemented it can’t encompass other issues. |
| Operational | Your current set of RPA is eliminating inefficiencies? | Processes that show instabilities, human interventions, rework issues are indications of bad automation and must be prioritized for improvements. |
Once you cover every topic that must be addressed first, run down with managers about the issues that naturally impact and influence each other routines. Drill down details about problems and uncertainties to create further improvement projects and assign them to specialists.
Auditing process automation
Corporate auditing has been a big issue in the past years with the growth of the digital market. Companies are having to incorporate new technologies in their processes to stay competitive. Unfortunately, it creates new chores that need to be assigned to employees. But till a certain level you can escalated some tasks to a RPA so that it can treat audit controls beforehand.
These tasks often consume a lot of time of people. Thus, executing them with an automation is a great solution. Business rules are the main road that lead these automations through safe path of auditing. To further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of audit practices, companies need to rethink their assessment using micro-automations in their departments, such as:
Capture data: searching and capturing data to initiate more complex decision-making processes.
Content standardization: ensuring that the information entered in the processes is valid and in accordance with company standards.
Data cleaning: automatically searching the databases to identify and clean records with errors and flaws.
Record validation: verifying, in the capture phase, the fields and registration according to the content standardization.
Conclusion
Automation still can’t execute professional judgement. Thus, for now it has the role to encompass repetitive, rule based and time consuming activities.
The mindset is to use these features to improve the experience and expertise of people involved. Therefore, to maximize the benefits of technology in processes, it not only crucial to implement automation in certain tasks but how to coordinate the evolution of activities in an automated landscape so that people can have more time to have insights to improve the systems further.
