Welcome to the Robotic Process Automation course (RPA).
So, this is going to be a very short course to get you up to speed with robotics process automation aka RPA.
This course is for you if you are an executive or a business owner or a director who just needs the high-level knowledge about what robotics process automation is and what it can do for your business in your industry, the way we’re going to structure this course is that we’re going to jump into the definition of ARPA and see what it’s all about.
Here’s how this course is going to be structured:
- We’ll talk about the benefits of RPA, what kind of benefits it can bring to your business.
- Then we’ll talk about the risks, what kind of risks you need to look out for when choosing to implement robotics, process automation and avoid those pitfalls that other companies have fallen into.
- And finally, we will look at case studies. We’ll look at 10 different case studies or use cases of robotics automation in 10 different industries.
These will be life examples with live numbers and very impressive and interesting use cases that might be beneficial for you and your business. So, let’s get started
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Table of Contents
- What is Robotic Process Automation OR What is RPA?
- Benefits of RPA
- Risks with RPA
- 10 Use Cases of RPA – With Real-Results
- Australian energy company
- A Bank in the UK
- A Food or beverages company
- A company which is in the health care sector, a UK company once again
- A logistics company
- Is quite similar in Indian manufacturing company
- Is a global professional service company
- A U.S. tech company
- Is a Japanese telecommunication company
- Summary
What is Robotic Process Automation OR What is RPA?
Automation is the practice of using easily programmable software to take care or handle highly repetitive high-volume tasks.
An example of an RPA system in action would be a situation where a bank worker needs to copy lots of fields from one system on their computer into and out of their system, for example, for compliance reasons.
And they perhaps spend 5 to 7 hours per week doing this. Well, this task can and probably should be automated to allow the worker to focus on more creative, more high-level tasks. And this is where RPA would come in a robotics submission system would be able to do that work for the worker, and there would be massive benefits associated with it. For instance, it would do it faster, the cost would be lower, it would be more reliable and so on.
So basically, the best way to think about robotics process automation is in the same way as automation is disrupting blue collar workers.
For instance, factory situations and conveyor belts and truck drivers. All those jobs are slowly being disrupted by automation, while white collar workers already are falling under the same trend where automation is coming in and slowly replacing or helping them do certain tasks that are very low level and don’t really need a human to be involved in them.
So, the key is here is that robotics preservation takes care of very low level tasks that are highly repetitive and can be easily defined. What exactly needs to be done?
The robotics first animation industry is growing very fast:
- According to Gartner research, just in 2013, the industry grew by 63% using RPA.
- According to Grandview Research report that they published just recently the size of the market in robotics. So, it currently stands at $597 million and 2025 is predicted to grow to 3.9 billion
That’s a 33.5% CAGR or a 500% growth rate over the forecast period. Industries that most commonly use robotics preservation are the banking and financial services and insurance industries, telecommunications and I.T., as well as manufacturing.
But those are just the top 3. As you’ll see from the examples in this course, virtually any industry and almost any company can use robotics automation to its advantage. We’ll see examples of retail logistics, health care companies using robotics process automation.
- According to Forrester Research, robotics process automation (RPA) stands to disrupt about 230 million jobs globally. So that’s about 9% of the global workforce
So, while it brings massive benefits, there is, of course, this question of the destruction of jobs. And that is a very important topic, something we will also touch on in this article, how to go about that change management to make sure that everybody is on board with robotics process automation in your organization
Benefits of RPA
We’re going to talk about the benefits of robotics process automation, how RPA is disrupting many industries.
So, let’s find out what are the core benefits that companies are getting out of this technology to start off:
- Our systems work 24/7, 365 days a year – meaning that your processes and your systems will never get disrupted and never stop working.
- Our systems never get sick and never take days off unlike human workers. So once again, you have that additional productivity benefit.
- Accuracy – Even when human workers have the best intentions and try their hardest, they can get tired and make mistakes, especially when it comes to manual entry of data. Whereas on the other hand, robotics process automation systems very rarely in <1% of cases could possibly make a mistake. So, the accuracy level is much, much higher. What we’ve actually seen is that once companies implement robotics automation systems instead of human workers, they’re error rates reduced by 95% to 99% in some cases
- Speed at which RPA executes tasks – What can take a human worker between 10 minutes and several hours will most likely take an RPA system. Several seconds to execute. So, as you can imagine, the speed is much, much higher and that brings additional value to processes
- Tracking – Our systems have inherent built-in tracking into them, which means there is an audit trail of everything that is going on. And this is very valuable for industries where compliance with regulations, where auditing plays an important role because you don’t need to create a separate process for that that is already built into the RPA itself
- Scalability – Our systems are almost infinitely scalable. Once you have set up an RPA and you need to service, for instance, more clients or customers or partners, you just add them on and ask the RPA to do more work and it will do that. You don’t have to hire additional staff as it is in the case of human workers benefit
- Human morale – RPA systems free up humans from repetitive tasks to do more creative work. And generally, what we see across different industries is that this increases job satisfaction and morale of the workforce. If this is managed appropriately, and people are given the opportunity to up skill and go onto this higher level and creative tasks
- Cost savings – Once the system is implemented because it takes away the manual labor. This can result in a massive cost savings for your company. And we’ll see more of this from the case studies
Risks with RPA
In 2017 report by Ernst and Young revealed that between 30% to 50% of RPA projects initially failed.
In this section, we’re going to understand what the risks are associated with an RPG project to make sure that your repair project does not end up in that statistic.
But before we do, I wanted to make a small caveat that that report is from June. Twenty seventeen has been over two years since then, and I personally expect that the number is much lower than 30 to 50 percent now.
So don’t let that put you off from RPA. But nevertheless, it’s important to be aware of these risks. So let’s have a look.
Automation systems risk
No one is associated with looking at our projects from an I.T. led standpoint rather than a business led standpoint.
And the best way to think about this is that if you have a physical workforce, so basically humans executing a certain task, you don’t have the IT department leading them, you have businesspeople leading them. So, the RPA systems that you will be implementing, they are the same, only that they are now a virtual workforce, not a physical workforce.
Nevertheless, the department should still not be leading the workforce, whether it’s physical or virtual. You need businesspeople to be leading your virtual workforce, training it up and making sure that they’re executing properly. So basically, leading those robots because the team have other things to do, and they’re not best positioned to understand or see how to lead this part of or how to lead this virtual workforce.
Targeting the wrong processes
So, RPA is designed to automate very simple processes that require repetitive tasks to be executed between simple or moderate processes.
They’re not designed for complex or high-level processes. So, when companies try to automate the wrong processes with RPA, they tend to fail because it’s simply not designed for the things. It’s important to keep in mind what is our design for and what parts of your business, what processes in your business can indeed help you out with risk
Change Management
The obvious intention of robotics process automation is to free up human labor. Now, this can be taken two ways. It can be taken positively that people are now able and free to do more creative, more high-level tasks.
On the other hand, it can be taken negatively, and people might see this as that they’re losing jobs and robots are edging them out. So, it’s very important to have this cultural change management in place before, during and after the RPA project is put in place, because that is the only way that you can communicate to your employees that they will be able to be more creative, do more interesting, work more high-level tasks, and that you will help them up skill in the right direction
Automating too much
So, on one hand, you want to make it clear that once the task is automated, human intervention is no longer required and that person is free to use that time to work on more creative, more high-level tasks.
On the other hand, it’s also a pitfall to try to automate everything. If there is a pilot, there’s a process where a person is executing complex on one side and repetitive tasks on the other side. You want to automate only the repetitive parts. As we discussed, our designed for very low level, mid-level tasks that are repetitive, not for high level complex.
So, you want to automate just the parts that are repetitive and a risk or a pitfall that businesses sometimes fall into is they try to automate absolutely everything that a single person or even a whole department is doing and might not be designed for that depending on the processes. So, it’s very important, once again, to be clear and not to try to automate too much, just the necessary things.
Skillset
So pretty much these days anybody can go and learn robotics process automation within 2 or 3 days and a consultant might come to you and say, we’ll do a proof of concept, and they will successfully deliver the proof of concept for you.
But very often proof of concept skills are insufficient to implement the RPA in the business integrated and make sure it’s robust, comprehensive and fail safe. So, look out for that. Make sure to work with consultants who know what they’re doing and who will. Deliver the project to successfully.
10 Use Cases of RPA – With Real-Results
In this section, we’re going to look at 10 different use cases of RPA in action in 10 different industries, and the intention behind this is to give you some examples of how you can use RPA in your business and in your industry.
An E-commerce company from the U.K
Uses RPA to automate its new product, which is an insurance for identity theft for its customers or customers who are registering for this product, and RPA was handling it instead of hiring a workforce. So basically, they automated a system even before it was done by manual workers. And what that allowed them to do is to avoid hiring and training up 22 new employees
Australian energy company
This is a quite a large company and quite a large use case of a robotic process, automation. They were able to do is to save two point three million dollars annually by automating their billing process until they deployed two hundred and eighty RPA robots over the course of 15 months, they reduced their billing error rate by 99%.
A Bank in the UK
Uses robotics automation to automate 10 different processes are from direct debits to credit card cancellations to audits and many more, and what that resulted in is that, for instance, their audits went down from 6 to 7 hours, went on mainly down to under a minute, and they are clearing house automated payment system.
Previously was done manually and took about 10 minutes to execute. Now, this process takes only 20 seconds. As you can imagine, the mass massively benefited from the speed advantage of robotics process automation use.
A Food or beverages company
Uses robotic process, automation for automating in invoice processing and internal financial reporting. And what that allowed them to do is to free up 25 people to do more high level and creative tasks and use.
A company which is in the health care sector, a UK company once again
Uses RPA to automate patient check ins. So basically, patients were able to self-check in with the help of RPA and that reduced the efforts that the health care facility had to put in by 50%, also increased the turnaround time. So basically, the turnaround time became twice as good and improved the quality of the data that the company was collecting on the patients
A logistics company
Uses robotics process automation to automate their billing and other processes, and this resulted in a 25% reduction in the amount of effort they had to put into those processes, a 25% reduction in turnaround time
Is quite similar in Indian manufacturing company
Uses robotics posterization to automate invoice processing systems, and that resulted in an 855 reduction in effort and a 10x improvement in turnaround time and use.
Is a global professional service company
one of the largest professional services companies in the world.
Uses RPA is for automating tax returns, business intelligence and reporting. And they were able to save 18 million dollars per annum using robotics automation.
A U.S. tech company
Uses RPA quite creatively and they automated lead generation data capturing from 50 different online publishers. And that saved them about $150K per year.
Is a Japanese telecommunication company
Uses robotic process automation, to automate maintenance processes that resulted in a 78% reduction of effort on their behalf, that resulted in improved data quality and better it audits
So there we go
Those were the 10 use cases of robotics process automation in action, and hopefully that sparked some ideas for how you can use robotics for summation in your business and in your industry.
Summary
So in a nutshell,
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as a transformative technology that is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. RPA software robots can automate repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming tasks, freeing up human workers to focus on more strategic, creative, and high-value tasks..
The future of RPA looks bright, with numerous trends and opportunities on the horizon. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global RPA market size is expected to reach $25.56 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 33.6% from 2020 to 2027. This growth is being driven by the increasing demand for automation solutions, the need for cost-efficient operations, and the rising adoption of cloud-based RPA solutions.
So, there we go.
I really hope that now you are much more comfortable and confident speaking about robotics process automation (rpa), and more importantly, seeing how you can apply them in your industry and in your business.
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