Digitization is essential to survive in today’s business world. It drives the workforce towards productivity and creativity and helps you optimize your business workflow. Process automation is the building block of this digitization and it helps us automate all aspects of our operations.
Despite that, several businesses still rely on manual tasks for crucial business processes. They carry out real-time processes like collecting, reviewing, and inputting information between multiple systems, portals, and websites manually.
Ultimately, repetitive, remedial tasks distract your employees, creating operational inefficiencies, and slowing productivity. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers a solution to manual process management. In this article, we will discuss 7 things you should know about Process Automation and RPA and how it transforms your digital transformation efforts.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is the process of automating repetitive actions in a business process. It helps improve efficiency and lower costs. Developers analyze how humans perform a certain task and recreate steps needed to complete that task through software. The software plays back, mimics, and repeats what the human does and then manages to complete the task.
Businesses first applied this technology to replace or augment human and digital labor, helping them create increasingly productive workforces. This also enabled them to relay repetitive tasks to digital labor and focus human labor efforts on higher-value activities. Now, it plays a crucial role in automating major business processes.
7 Things You Should Know about Process Automation and RPA
1. OCR-Based RPA Optimizes Document Management
Optical Character Recognition serves as the backbone of digital transformation efforts in most organizations. Unsurprisingly, OCR plays a key role in an RPA platform as well, because it helps companies digitize the bulk of their papers.
As a result, many RPA vendors have started implementing advanced OCR and including advanced features such as data extraction from images and documents. You can also leverage OCR tools in RPA applications with the help of screen scraping.
Using screen scraping like this allows you to capture bitmap data from system screens, then later cross-check it against stored information. At the same time, OCR features allow RPA solutions to structure data as they process structured documents.
These features revolutionize document management and replace manual processing with advanced process automation. Because of that, companies can now use RPA and OCR-based solutions to process tax forms, invoices, as well as, claims.
2. Actionable Intelligence Transforms Decision-Making
Effective decision-making requires extensive input from processes. RPA enables companies to gain in-depth insight from internal teams and transfer that knowledge to management. Features like actionable intelligence in RPA can help you gain and apply knowledge as skills.
You can deploy robots that gather both unstructured and structured data, process it, convert it into information, and ultimately transform the information into actionable intelligence. These insights not only benefit the management, but also the end-user or customers.
Because of these features, RPA solutions are able to provide AI and cognitive intelligence and integrate complex technologies such as cognitive automation, computer vision, and machine learning. These technologies improve RPA solutions decisions periodically, allowing you to automate your workflow without extensive intervention.
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3. Greater Security
Companies using automation have strong user access to management features. Because of this, RPA solutions are able to provide companies role-based security and ensure action-specific permissions.
Moreover, RPA tools allow you to configure and customize encryption features in your processes. This helps us secure certain data types and defend your system against the interruption of network communication.
At the same time, you can encrypt the automated data, audits, and instructions your robotic solution accesses. Doing so ensures the legitimacy of historical record compliance and limits malicious tampering.
Lastly, RPA solutions give you detailed information regarding how users log into your system and how they execute each task. Such features assist internal security in maintaining compliance with standard industry regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX.
4. Rich-Analytical Suite
RPA solutions give you a sophisticated interface filled with several analytical features. They help you determine the performance of your robotic workforce. Plus, all of these features are connected to central control, making management a lot easier for you and your company.
Such an interface can help you access your robots, servers, and workflows from anywhere you want. The in-depth operational operation analysis also helps you track operations and determine issues while at the same time, streamlining future workloads.
5. Script-Less Automation
RPA tools used nowadays are mostly code-free. In other words, you don’t have to program them to perform tasks across your enterprise extensively. Even employees who are less skilled at programming can help you create bots, by using GUI commands and different intuitive wizards.
An RPA development platform requires less code and, therefore, minimizes the amount of hand-code-writing you need for process automation. This then helps you accelerate the delivery of business apps and lowers your initial cost of installation, training, and deployment.
6. Rules-Based Exception Handling
In process automation, it’s extremely important to create rules-based exception handling. One of the best features of an RPA system is that it supports deployments carried out by rules-based exception handling.
Such features help you process exceptions proactively. Exceptions are problems that a robotic solution encounters and it doesn’t know how to deal with them. Bots must report these exceptions to administrators.
Once the solution encounters an exception, it triggers the server to re-assign the same process to another bot. At the same time, removes the first bot from production. If the second bot deals with the issue successfully, the solutions will maintain the reassignment changes its priority to level 2. In case it is unsuccessful, the solution will stop the second bot and issue a level-1 alert for the exception and report a failed resolution.
7. Seamless Integration Improves Processes
RPA provides you with all the features to integrate and merge several third-party applications in your business’s digital infrastructure. Because of this seamless integration, RPA solutions give you unparalleled flexibility in testing your digital workforce performance.
Robotic process automation plays a key role in implementing process automation and driving efficiency and lowering costs across various industries. Process automation powered by RPA is the key to digital transformation.
