What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?
What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?
Robotic Process Automation or RPA is the process of programming software bots to automate business processes. High volume, manual, rule-based, and repetitive tasks are best performed by software robots. For example invoicing, or data entry.
RPA is not Artificial Intelligence or AI. It does not have a physical form and has no resemblance to humans. The RPA Bot can only do what it has been told and programmed to do.
It is not a threat to employees as the RPA Bot is not capable of making complex choices. All logical and critical thinking functions are still performed by people.
What RPA does provide businesses is more productive and profitable outcomes. The software Bot performs consistent error free output. Ensuring 24/7 continuity and improved customer service.
The tedious, repetitive tasks are performed by the Bot. The high value activities are performed by Employees.
Customer satisfaction is also improved with RPA. For example in the area of delivery, RPA can help reduce the average handling time resulting in an enhanced customer experience.
Reduced costs and a higher profitability are other key benefits. Other advantages include reduced training costs, and easier software migrations.
RPA places automation software tools at the users disposal. Paving the way toward digital transformation.
OCH are process automation experts. Focusing on where we can add automation technology to your business. And, on the processes and people needed to be as productive, efficient, and cost-effective as possible. We are ready to help you on your RPA Robotic Automation Journey.
Contact us today and let us get started.
What is RPA used for and what are the Benefits?
Does your business have high-volume, low-value, repetitive and mundane tasks? If the answer is yes then your business can benefit from Robotic Process Automation or RPA technology.
However, not all business processes are suited to be automated. One of the biggest mistakes that organisations make when it comes to RPA and automation in general is adding automation to complex processes that do not suit RPA. RPA is designed to automate repetitive, rule-based processes and flag exceptions for human interventions.
Try not to fall into the trap of making an intuitive decision of which processes should be automated. Instead, conduct an objective analysis. A good framework to help you determine if RPA suits a process is the following:
Where is RPA Best Suited?
Can a degree of automation be achieved for a particular process? Are there system constraints and requirements? What is the volume of transactions that goes through the system?
High volume transactions that are repetitive and rule-based are particularly well suited to RPA for example. Low-volume, complex transactions are better suited to humans.
What Benefits does RPA provide?
Will there be a financial and strategic value gained through the robotic automation of the process? For example, if it’s a labour intensive and repetitive process, there will be a cost benefit gained.
Rules-based software bots will perform the process faster and error free. This in turn frees up human employees to work on more high-value work that uses their skills. Other key benefits provided is process control, increased team capacity, along with streamlined and documented processes.
What are the risks involved with RPA?
What is the degree of risk involved in automating the process? Regulatory requirements, stakeholder buy-in, and system stability should all be appropriately considered.
What is Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Firstly, let us look at the what Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is.
Business Process Management (BPM) streamlines underlying processes to maximize value and efficiency of the overall process. With a BPM solution, an entire process is analysed from end-to-end to find ways to automate the entire process, improve workflows, streamline processes and improve efficiencies and value.
BPM is a discipline as it is an action that studies and analyses entire business processes for beneficial business outcomes. RPA is a technology that compliments BPM to perform repetitive and mundane tasks that have been identified. For example, BPM looks at software solutions for automating the entire Finance Process and RPA offers the automation technology to process invoices – a component of Finance.
However, the development and maintenance of software solutions can be complex and resource intensive, often requiring large investments.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a strategy that reduces labor costs and efforts by contracting out the process to another party. Some examples of Business Processes that are commonly outsourced as a BPO services are customer service or accounting. The bonus of BPO is that offshore vendors offer dramatic cost savings and expanded service availability by taking advantage of lower labor costs and different time zones.
RPA also complements BPO the same as it does for BPM, as it provides the technology for completing the repetitive business processes that have been outsourced, such as data entry.
However, BPO poses management challenges and security/privacy risks. In addition, loss of process control causes unforeseen costs to emerge, and human factors that negatively affect process outcomes are not addressed. Further, bored, frustrated people continue to make the same mistakes.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) complements and improves BPM and BPO, as it provides the technology to complete the repetitive tasks that are a part of the BPM or BPO end-to-end processes
RPA is an invaluable tool that utilises Bot technology to automate routine repetitive work in a lightweight, easy-to-maintain way, that can address the challenges posed by both BPM and BPO.
BPM and BPO solutions, while they can deliver positive business outcomes if implemented and managed judiciously, RPA provides the tools that aid with delivering the positive business process solutions. RPA is best suited for the high-volume, low-value repetitive tasks like generating invoices, or transferring data from one system to another.
In addition, it also provides businesses with a reliable and cost saving resource to support the day-to-day routine business tasks. Freeing up staff for the more value-add, complex business activities.
OCH your RPA and Automation Partner
At OCH, we are not interested in simply adding RPA to everything. Our goal is to build a more efficient, productive, cost-effective, and higher revenue-generating business, and that means matching the right solutions to each process or system in the business. We are here to help you on you RPA Journey – contact us today and lets get started!!
What are the biggest benefits of RPA and working with OCH Limited?
We give you a comprehensive insight into your processes. Bot activity can be more closely logged and monitored to enable a comprehensive analysis of business processes.
We create a better employee experience. Use the human resource capacity freed up from repetitive work to get more interesting, high-value activities done.
We help you to reduce costs. Cost to automate processes and maintain them are usually lower than those of human resources. With consistent error free output, 24/7 continuity and improved customer satisfaction.
Achieve greater scalability. Solutions to expand or reduce the processing capacity to meet variable or seasonal demand are technological rather than HR-based.
Improve process compliance. Bots will precisely execute prescribed rules, so mistakes and errors are reduced.
Better predict process outcome. Reduce the contribution of human factors in the execution of rules-based processes.
Increase speed. Automation can reduce the cycle time and increase the availability of a business process.
Increase process agility. Changes in business processes can go live more quickly by eliminating the time to train workers and the need to reinforce the training.
Win-Win Automation Solutions. A high volume of tedious tasks automated, reduced handling times, improved customer service and happy employees focused on high-value work.
Contact us today to start the RPA process!
See how Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is used in the every day lives of our customers case studies.
FAQs on RPA
Why do we need RPA?
Robotic process automation (RPA) helps boost productivity across a business. Software Bots handle the boring, repetitive task with speed, cutting tasks processing times and freeing up human employees to work on more skilled tasks.
Accuracy and consistent reliability is a big plus as the human errors, like the transposing of numbers, is a thing of the past on tasks performed by the bot.
Reduced costs with improved efficiencies are two additional benefits gained by combining RPA tools and human employees. With processing times reduced along with costly errors on tasks result in a decline in processing costs and an increase in employee output.
Scalability is an added advantage with RPA when there is a flux in volumes, for example, due to seasonal demand. With automation Bots can scale up and down instantly, and saving the need to hire additional staff.
Improved business data security in areas dealing with confidential and personal data is another benefit the use of an RPA Bot can provide. Reducing the number of times human contact is required with sensitive data. Compliance is easier to achieve.
RPA Bots assist with the producing of data for important analytics, and help with identifying process gaps and areas for improvements when data is gathered to on possible processes that could be automated.
With employees involvement on mundane and repetitive tasks reduced, staff have more time to focus on their customers and providing better customer service experiences.
Why is robotic process automation transformative?
A roadmap to digital transformation is a common denominator in all industries worldwide. RPA technology as well as supporting digital transformation makes achieving the transformation fast, and with ease.
As well as changing how businesses globally get work done it enables businesses to automate at scale and across the full range of their business activities – from Inbound logistics through to Service and Procurement to HR and more.
Software robots do repetitive and lower-value work, like logging into applications and systems, moving files and folders, extracting, copying, and inserting data, filling in forms, and completing routine analyses and reports. This frees up humans to focus on things they do best and enjoy more, while also boosting productivity, efficiency, and resilience for enterprises.
Where can RPA be used?
RPA today is freeing humans from the boring, mundane and repetitive tasks and this is resulting in new efficiencies. Robotic Process Automation solutions work across a broad spectrum of industries and processes. The broad spectrum of industries range from financial services to healthcare to manufacturing to the public sector to retail and far beyond have implemented RPA in the all areas of business
RPA is widespread because it can be applied to many different types of processes. Any process that is high volume, driven by rules, and repeatable is a good candidate for automation.
What are important RPA features and capabilities?
To manage an enterprise-wide RPA program, you need technology that can help you automate processes and manage a new enterprise-wide capability. Your RPA technology must support you end-to-end, from discovering automation opportunities, to quickly building bots, to managing automated workflows.
Other important features of RPA technology include:
- Analytics capability to analyse the bots workforce performance. OCH’s RPA software uses a central console to monitor and manage automated processes.
- Security including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and strict permissions for the Cloud and who can access data . Only approved partners subject to the same security protocols would have access to your data.
- Options for Deployment and Hosting – RPA tools have the ability to be deployed to work with the cloud, terminal services or virtual machines. Because of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud, this is the preferred deployment method.
- Debugging – RPA’s biggest benefit from a development perspective is its ability to dynamically adjust to changes. Some RPA tools require you to stop running the process to make changes, while others allow for dynamic interaction while debugging. This also allows you to change variable values to test different scenarios without stopping the process. This dynamic approach to debugging allows for on-the-fly development and resolving issues in a production environment without requiring changes to the process.
Why is RPA the fastest-growing enterprise software in the world?
RPA is easy to implement and delivers quantifiable value, making it attractive to enterprises worldwide.
RPA can help organizations across various industries address operational issues in new and powerful ways.
Functional area leaders such as, customer service managers, and HR professionals find that RPA improves many processes, resulting in higher capacity, faster throughput, and fewer errors.
RPA technology investment for CFO’s, deliver rapid Return on Investment with minimal upfront costs.
RPA can be implemented with little disruption, making it a key enabler for digital transformation. Modern RPA technology offers scalable, enterprise-ready platforms that are easy for employees to adopt into their workdays.
How can RPA enhance business processes?
Our RPA solution creates a multi-thread, digital process queue for documents and processing. For example, invoices received are digitized with the help of algorithms and validated with business rules for accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and accessibility.
The beauty of RPA is that while rules-based processes can be followed by Bots, exceptions to the rule are flagged for human intervention because of data ingestion that is automated for exception handling reports and dashboards.
This keeps humans in the loop while also ensuring that people deal with complex tasks that require human interventions.
Bots are designed to learn as they go along, improving the algorithm for each and every supplier that an organisation works with. As the Bots are provided with more business rules and engineers get a better understanding of how the automated system works, the process gets faster and more efficient. Thanks to a continuous learning loop between the customer, the engineering team and OCH’s Bots.
This ultimately means that manual checks and balances become unnecessary. If the rules are in place and the process is followed, the software Bots will flag any exceptions to the rule.
If anything, errors – which tend to be the result of human errors due to repetitive, monotonous tasks – will be eradicated if the correct processes have been automated.
Finally, a trend analysis is possible based on historical data, which ensures that the system is operating to scope.
What is the difference between RPA and AI?
RPA is used to automate repetitive processes that are done in conjunction with people (attended automation).
AI is used to automate processes from start to finish without the need for human intervention (unattended automation).
RPA relies on structured inputs and logic, while AI relies on unstructured inputs and develops its own logic.
Does RPA reduce risks previously existent in my business operations?
Yes. Once you minimize RPA security risks by implementing role-based access or encryption, robotic process automation will render business operations less hazardous overall.
Overall, RPA lowers security-related efforts associated with training employees and teaching them security practices (such as password management, applications of privacy settings etc) because it ensures a zero-touch environment. By eliminating manual work, automation minimises security risks at a macro level.
Besides security risks, the zero-touch environment of RPA also helps mitigate other human-related risks in business operations. An automated environment is free from biases, prejudices, or variability, all of which can impact human work with the risk of error. Because of this, RPA ensures less risky and consistent work with trustworthy data.
The lack of randomness and variability in automation further guarantees increased uniform compliance with the company’s requirements, which are built into the RPA platform.
On the other hand, flexibility, and intrinsic adaptation to change of RPA platforms ensure scalability of the automated processes, or their capacity to adapt to change and increasing complexity. RPA is thus better able to deal with the risks inherent in the dynamic world of business.
If I automate my business processes with RPA, is it secure?
Yes, your data is 100% safe and secure and only your chosen people from within your own organization will have access to it.
We do understand that IT teams are concerned about both security and governance, and so this is a natural concern.
RPA is designed to operate software as a human would, so all the same security measures would apply. That said, our advice is always to follow these three guidelines:
- Train your workforce around security awareness, password protections and how to recognise malware attacks.
- Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- Set strict permissions for the Cloud and who can access data
Only approved partners subject to the same security protocols would have access to your data. The Bots reading your data would not be able to share it locally, because all your security measures would be in place.
Your data is in an encrypted format when it is stored in databases, as well as during transit between the server and your machine. We undertake multiple security audits and reviews to ensure this.
How do you mitigate RPA risks?
The following are four best practices to mitigate RPA security risks:
- The most prominent security factor is segregating access to data, based on assigning different roles in an RPA team. Each member’s activities are constrained by the assigned role, which keeps fraudulent activity under control. For example, no change can pass into the live environment before attaining the necessary approvals, as required by established protocols. All users, processes or persons must utilise login credentials to access the environment (known as a credential vault). This means that only specific authorised users may reach sensitive data in the system.
- Active directory integration is used to assign roles by centralising team credentials for management. It provides a control centre for login credentials. Tracking the activities performed by robotic processes allows better and more direct control over potentially troublesome actions on third-party platforms. An important consequence is the configuration and enforcement of the division of labour within the team. An RPA environment is strictly customised via active directory integration, thereby increasing business efficiency. This clarifies why enhanced security levels of RPA map onto the enhanced efficiency of automation, another of its key benefits.
- Encryption complements active directory integration as a means towards security of data use. If role-based access reduces internal security risks, encryption deals with protection of the company from external malicious attacks. High-level encryption protocols protect the management details of the credential vault.
- Other factors that contribute to enhancing RPA security are working on scheduled tasks, having a clear desk policy, and ensuring protection against malware and Trojans.
