Robotic Process Automation
How robotic process automation simplifies processes and boosts efficiency
Automating tasks and driving down costs at the same time is a chief concern for businesses. Additionally, while businesses are planning to implement new technologies on existing workflows, they need to consider freeing up staff for more value-added activities.
In 2019, Gartner named robotic process automation (RPA) as the fastest-growing market-segment in the entire software space. It’s not a major surprise that RPA is one of the technologies that can benefit various enterprises and deliver unprecedented value to business processes.
Benefits of robotic process automation
- Accuracy: RPA software is generally less prone to errors. It works with high uniformity and precision.
- Consistency: In RPA, tasks can be automated as well as configuration driven. This ensures that all tedious tasks and processes are executed in the same manner, which, in turn, helps in eliminating the risk of accidents or human error.
- Cost-cutting technology: RPA reduces the manual workforce as well as the cost of operations.
- High productivity: The time to execution using RPA is faster, which increases overall productivity.
- Less coding: RPA software doesn’t require a lot of programming knowledge.
How has RPA transformed industries?
RPA is increasingly becoming an enterprise-level opportunity. Many businesses that started with function-specific RPA programs have evolved to take advantage of larger opportunities.
RPA has improved businesses processes in industries such as banking and finance, insurance, and healthcare.
- RPA in Banking and Finance: From application status to balance inquiry, banks have to respond to numerous queries and demands from customers, with low turnaround time. RPA, along with optical character recognition (OCR), resolves the issues around the account payable process. Be it credit card processes, KYC process, general ledgers, or fraud detection, RPA reduces a significant amount of time spent on data handling.
- RPA in Insurance: Insurance companies are immersed in filling up back-office forms as most of the documentation process is still paper based. RPA helps analyse vast volumes of data and makes deriving actionable insights easier.
- RPA in Healthcare: With RPA, outdated systems that make healthcare workers perform needlessly repetitive tasks are being upgraded to speed up processes. RPA helps medical supply distributors verify thousands of patients’ insurance eligibility daily while saving time and costs.
- RPA in Retail: RPA has helped turn around service delivery in the retail sector. Operations such as taxation, auditing, and HR are some of the areas where RPA has delivered tangible benefits.
Widely accepted use cases of RPA
- Data migration/entry and forms processing: When forms need to be transferred from paper to digital, an RPA solution can read the forms and input the data into the system.
- Onboarding employees: RPA provides the perfect solution to ensure that every employee is onboarded. Compliance is certain, while average handling time (AHT) goes down.
- Help desk processes: RPA can help diminish workload at help desks by handling straightforward, repetitive issues.
- Call centre operations: Customer requests received by call centres can be supported in a manner similar to help desks.
- Credit card applications: Bots can be programmed to easily handle everything from gathering information and documents to performing credit and background checks.
Other widely practised use cases of RPA include claims administration, sales support processes, scheduling systems, expense management, and data crawling.
Implementing RPA in existing work processes
Before considering RPA solutions and service providers, here’s some food for thought — E&Y has noted that as many as 30–50% of RPA projects fail during the initial stage.
Businesses must have a roadmap to ensure that RPA initiatives succeed in the real world. A successful RPA initiative requires a sound strategy, backed by sufficient financing and ongoing appraisal of performance and results. Done right, RPA helps businesses free up and realign resources to focus on high-value customers and strategic roles.
Infosys BPM helped achieve major benefits when we automated several HR processes for a global MNC. The automation reduced manually intensive tasks by 70% while speeding up processes by 55%. Best of all, the possibilities of errors were reduced to almost nil. The partnership also resulted in significant net savings for the client.
RPA offerings at Infosys BPM
We reimagine business process management with intelligent process automation — a blend of RPA and artificial intelligence — to deliver an innovative business process service stack, built using thousands of hours of learning and testing, and shaped to perfection in varied and complex client environments. We work with our clients to provide advisory services, pilots and PoCs, automation CoE setup, scripting, deployment, and bot support, among other solutions.
Infosys BPM follows a platform- and technology-agnostic approach to automation that focuses on ensuring metrics improvement, savings, and ROI. Learn more about our RPA offerings today.
