Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that relies on software robots to automatically perform repeatable, time-consuming, high-volume processes without human intervention. The RPA helps to emulate the human actions and can perform the various repetitive business processes and multiple tasks with ease, faster and more efficiently than the employees.

By automating these processes, RPA delivers better efficiency, improved productivity, significant time and cost savings among other benefits. This allows businesses to offer better services, hence enhance customer satisfaction and revenues.

Ideally, RPA enables organizations to perform a wide range of tasks more efficiently and at lower costs while producing much better and error-free results than humans. It, therefore, enables organizations to realign resources and focus more on their customers and strategies.

Today, RPA is one of the fastest-growing technologies with great potential and expected to reach a market value of $2.9 billion by 2020 (Forrester report).

To see how it is likely to change the digital landscape, below are the trends and best practices.

RPA trends

Currently, automation and other emerging technologies are disrupting the traditional workforce and eliminating some jobs. It is also creating new opportunities, new types of jobs, roles, and skills requirements, hence influencing how businesses deliver their services.

Here are the current and future RPA trends;

Better customer experience

As companies look for ways to prioritize and respond to their customers' queries as fast and accurately as possible, RPA comes out as an ideal solution. This helps the organizations to offer better services quickly and at lower costs.

Basically, the RPA supports activities such as online chats hence enabling the organizations or businesses to address their customer’s queries. For example, the automation technology eases the work of handling online queries and can also work in reception areas or banking halls to assist customers. This eventually results in better customer experience and allows the company to build brand loyalty.

More job opportunities

Although RPA removes the human responsibilities in most of the processes, resulting in lower labor requirements, the technology is most likely going to create other new opportunities.

However, the RPA will mean a change of roles for the employees and there will be requirements for new skills. For example, there is going to be a growing demand for professionals to support RPA solutions, but this will definitely require the right skills.

The automation technology will also create other jobs in the mechanical, civil, IT and other industries since there will be an increased demand for robots, the right infrastructure and more.

Integrate with AI and machine learning technologies

RPA is ideal for highly repetitive, labor-intensive rules-based processes which can be programmed to perform certain tasks. Although the technology is helping businesses to improve productivity, save costs and time in its present state, adding the cognitive technologies will make it more effective.

The use of AI, machine learning, IoT and other emerging technologies will increase the scope of RPA and enable organizations to improve the processing and managing of data. For example, Integrating AI and machine learning into RPA gives it the ability to even handle less repetitive but more complex tasks such as recognizing certain patterns or detecting and responding to certain behavior changes.

Eventually, RPA will be applicable in almost any department ranging from human resource and finance to customer service and production.

Reducing job outsourcing

RPA will have a great impact on outsourced jobs. As more companies embrace the technology, there is a likely hood that it will replace most of the jobs that organizations have been outsourcing. This will help them to cuts costs, improve efficiency and increase productivity since the robots can work 24/7.

However, automation will also create new opportunities for people with the right skills. As such, outsourcing will still remain but now have different roles.

Increased adoption of the RPA technology

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an intensive technology that is rapidly gaining popularity. As the RPA matures, it is finding a lot of applications in various industries where it is offering a wide range of benefits to businesses and customers.

Basically, this is likely to be a top trending technology as organizations realize its many benefits of streamlining the businesses processes. The technology continues to experience robust growth and more businesses have deployed it while many others are at different planning or implementation stages.

Several studies show that the RPA market is growing. For example, a study by Grand View Research estimates the market to reach $8.75 billion by 2024 from a figure of about $350 million in 2018. Gartner Research on the other hand projects that the RPA software spending in 2022 will be about $2.4 billion. It further estimates that about 80 percent of large corporates will by using some form of RPA technology by the end of 2022. And as more companies deploy the technology, those already using it will automate a larger number of processes.

Large companies to retraining staff

Organizations are facing challenges getting the people with the right skills to deploy and manage the new technologies. Most companies and especially large corporates are finding it hard to find people with new talent and opting to retrain their staff so that they can acquire the relevant skills. For example, Amazon is planning to retrain about 100,000 employees and equip them with the new skills that will enable then to perform in the changing environment. Other companies that are taking the same approach include Wal-Mart, AT&T, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and others as they prepare them to take other roles. Generally, this can boost the workers' morale and prevent them from leaving the organization.

By training the employees on automation and other emerging technologies equips them with the necessary skills to handle new challenges and possibilities.

Customers will be interacting with RPA without knowing it

RPA enables organizations to automate some of the customer service tasks. This enables them to use software robots to interact and serve their customers much faster and efficiently than human beings. Most of the times, the customers will not even notice that they are being served robots.

RPA best practices

To get the most out of the RPA, here are the best practices.

• Determine the business impact of the RPA processes and whether automation will benefit the organization in its operations. Ideally, it is important to define the desired ROI and then see if the RPA will deliver.

• Automate the high volume processes and repetitive processes that deliver more value. The best approach is to target the areas with a large number of processes and where automating such will make a bigger impact. However, the organization can start small, and gradually add more processes after ensuring that these are working.

• Optimize the processes for automation before applying RPA. This should make it easier to automate and maintain the systems.

• Involve the management, staff, and users.

• Another important issue is to consider is the governance of the RPA processes. There should be clear guidelines, policies, and regulations. The success of the RPA implementation depends on how well everyone complies with the regulations and policies in place.

Identifying the processes where automation delivers greater value

Ideally, it is important to look at the process that follows the criteria below

• High volume processes: Basically, the RPA automates the specified process and when applied to high volume repetitive tasks, it reduces the manual human efforts, hence increasing the speed of delivery. The best practice is to start with high volume processes.

• The repetitive and time-consuming tasks: The robotic process automation technology is ideal for the repetitive high volume tasks that usually consume a lot of time.

• Rules-based processes: Automate the processes that follow specific rules. Typically, an automation project may involve programming the RPA bots to follow certain rules. As such the likely candidates that the processes that can be programmed.

• Processes prone to human errors: Automating such tasks eliminates a wide range of errors that are likely to occur when performing the processes manually.

• Processes with greater impact: These are the activities that have an impact on the cost as well as revenue and most often the expensive processes that touch the customers.

• Speed-sensitive processes: Processes, where speed is important in delivering greater value to the customers, are also good candidates for RPA. Generally, these are the tasks which, if not done in good time, will delay service to the customers. Automating such enables the organization to provide an almost instant response.

Determine the processes that RPA can automate easily

RPA offers many benefits. However, not all processes can be automated. Also, it may not be cost-effective to automate some tasks.

The best processes to automate using RPA are already established and stable tasks that do not change often. Otherwise, automating the processes that change on a daily basis will require more maintenance since the developers must keep on changing the RPAs solution to match the changes.

There are some processes that cannot be automated in their present state. For these, the best approach is to break them into automatable sub-processes and apply RPA.

Although part of the process will still remain manual, the automated part will deliver several benefits from the RPA.

Get support from management and other staff

People will still play a role even with automation. Support from everyone in the organizations is vital in ensuring the success of the RPA implementation. The management needs to see the benefits of the RPA and it is important to have a proposal that clearly shows the benefits, ROI, and how the automation will improve efficiency, production and more.

It is also important to explain to everyone in the organization about the impact of the automation and especially in affected departments where employees may feel like their jobs are at stake. Also, depending on whether the RPA is on an outsourced or in-house solution, it still requires a few people to manage the automated processes.

For the jobs that RPA replaces, the best option is to re-train the staff and equip them with the necessary skills to fit in the new setup. RPA may open up other opportunities where the employees can take up roles as long as they acquire the right skills.

Test the RPA solution before going live

There should be a thorough software testing services of the RPA solution before deploying it for use by employees and customers. This should verify that all processes are working as programmed. For example, there is a need to check how the different user devices, screen resolutions, and other settings work with the new system.

Evaluate the results from the test bot to ensure that all is working accurately

Checking the output of the RPA bot randomly and comparing with historical data helps to verify that the results as expected. Any significant deviation should be addressed.

Establish governance

Develop clear governance of the new, bot-driven processes and ensure there is support from all stakeholders, including the management and team in the area being automated. At this point, it is important to establish a maintenance program to ensure that the bots are up to date and able to function as required when there are changes in the processes.

Develop a fallback plan

Although RPA is great in automating most of the manual processes, it is best practice to have a fallback plan to prevent problems when things are not working out. For example, if there is a failure or need to take down the RPA for maintenance or other reasons, a fallback plan will fill in the gap and ensure that the company will continue offering services. This may not have the same speed as when automation is working and organizations should minimize its use.

Analyze the impact of RPA

After implementation, find out the impact of RPA on business operations. The best approach is to record the results, savings and the impact on the overall operations. A periodic analysis of the performance enables the company to establish how automation is benefiting them, and also plan better for future RPA projects.

Maintain the RPA solution

As technology is evolving, there are likely to be regular updates. Sometimes, this may be due to changes in the processes with the organization or new tasks that require automation.

Ideally, assigning a team to take charge of the implementation and maintenance is vital for the success and success of the RPA.

Conclusion

RPA is a technology that is automating most of the business processes that human workers perform. Generally, the technology replaces the human workers with software robots that perform the repetitive, rule-based and time-consuming jobs.

In today’s operations, humans perform most of the technology functions. However, with robotic process automation, the software performs the tasks hence replacing the human worker. For a long time, robots have worked in the manufacturing industry to perform physical activities. But today, the RPA is enabling the automation of business processes and consequently improving the efficiency, speed, and accuracy.