Signals from the financial market don’t paint an optimistic picture for the near term.
As businesses face the realities of working through an uncertain economy, they’ll likely be looking to efficiency and productivity enabling automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). These technologies will enable them to automate manual process at scale, deploy workers to top priority needs, and concentrate more on strategic approaches that will assist them through the ups and downs of today’s economic climate.
What is RPA and Why Should I Care?
Robotic Process Automation refers to software that can be easily programmed to do typically basic (and advanced in certain cases), repetitive, rules-based tasks across applications.
RPA offers an alternative to traditional IT integration. It uses a machine-based automation technology (bot) that possesses data entry, interchange, and manipulation between applications, humans, and processes. RPA does this by mimicking human interactions with web applications, desktop applications, web sites, portals, Excel worksheets, legacy green-screen apps, etc.
Increase productivity by up to 200% in certain processes, leading to faster turnaround times and increased output, according to research by McKinsey & Company
Supports redeployment of resources to higher value functions; 93% of RPAs do not replace humans
Cuts down on errors and reduces the risk of non-compliance
Enables consistent performance and increases productivity
Anyone can use it — advanced technology will allow business users, IT workers, and developers to use drag-and-drop functionality to automate processes I
Allows organizations to scale operations more efficiently without significant increases in labor costs. According to Gartner, organizations can achieve a 10% to 25% increase in scalability through RPA implementation.
Automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value activities. Research by Forrester indicates that RPA can save employees up to 40% of their time on routine tasks.
Enjoying this insight?
Sign up for our newsletter to receive data-driven insights right to your inbox on a monthly basis.
RPA has evolved with time.All types of RPA promote cost savings, increased performance, and error reduction. Modern technology plays an important role in the evolution of RPA, from cloud auto-scaling and load balancing, to using AI for automating judgments in tasks.
Assisted RPA
The most common type of RPA is Assisted RPA. This is when automation can perform tasks and activities on a person’s desktop, laptop, etc. A perfect example of this would be recording a function on RPA software to perform a calculation, query, even cut and paste on-demand. The user would playback the function as needed to simplify routines and increase productivity.
This type of RPA is also referred to as RPA 1.0 and is practical only when users have the ability to invoke the RPA themselves on-demand. Although assisted RPA will improve user performance, it is not typically practiced at enterprise scale.
Unassisted RPA
Automation that can run without users and can run at any time(on a schedule) is called Unassisted RPA.In this type of RPA,referred to as RPA 2.0, the RPA software is deployed on one to multiple servers for scale. It does not require user interaction and is used to automate an end-to-end business or IT process. Dashboards are commonly used to orchestrate tasks and monitor performance. The development of this RPA requires precision, keeping in mind there is no human interaction throughout this process.
Intelligent Automation
Intelligent Automationis abusiness-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It combines RPA with a range of complementary technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), process mining, and analytics.It leveragesadvanced technologies to mine data, process structured or unstructured data, and analyze text to identify automation candidates. Intelligent Automation also extends beyond traditional RPA to automate end-to-end business processesfrom simple tasks.
Cognitive Automation
Cognitive Automation is used within Intelligent Automation efforts and integrates artificial intelligence and machine learning,enabling the software bots to understand, interpret, and act on unstructured data sources, such as emails, documents, and images. It simulates human learning to grasp knowledge from a dataset, recognize patterns, and make judgments. Cognitive Automation can be used to automate a wide range of enterprise tasks, from routine processes to complex data analysis and can lead to greater productivity, faster turnaround times, and improved customer experiences.
Determining the Best Candidate for Automation
Traditional RPA vs Intelligent Automation vs Cognitive Automation
Traditional RPA
Traditional RPA supports automation based on structured data and is limited to automating simple, repetitive tasks.
Some typical use cases associated with Traditional RPA include:
Swivel chair process for data exchange between systems and processes, especially pre-API legacy applications requiring greenscreen (or other dated interface) user interactions
Standardizing data across disparate systems / processes: data cleansing, association, and manipulation
Quality Control checks – validating data meets known criteria prior to proceeding to the next step of a key organizational process
Text analytics / document tagging to digitized formats or document processing
Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation aims to automate not only repetitive tasks but also knowledge work and decision-making processes that involve unstructured data and human judgment.
Some typical use cases associated with Intelligent Automation include:
Expense report submission, approval routing, reimbursement processing, and reporting.
Invoice validation, line-item verification, and cross-check against existing records to identify discrepancies
Transaction monitoring and suspicious activity flagging
Cognitive Automation
Cognitive Automation takes things a step further by enabling bots to perform tasks that previously required human intervention, such as data extraction, document classification, sentiment analysis, and decision-making based on contextual information.
Some typical use cases associated with Cognitive Automation include:
Analyzing customer feedback, social media posts, and online reviews to understand sentiment and gauge customer satisfaction.
Implementing chatbots and virtual assistants to automate customer support, sales inquiries, and internal service desk requests.
Detecting fraudulent activities, such as payment fraud, identity theft, and account takeovers, in real-time.
As you can see, automation is quickly becoming a game changer for those organizations taking advantage of the efficiencies and productivity gains that can be achieved by leveraging this still emerging technology.By leveraging automation, you can help to recession-proof your organization by scaling operational efficiencies and streamlining cash flows.
To learn more about how this technology can benefit your organization, contact us to speak to an expert today.
Regina Rider is a Director of Client Success with more than 20 years of experience leading operational and technical teams to deliver transformative solutions for clients in the communications, manufacturing, and financial industries.
AI agents are emerging as the next frontier in automation. Unlike traditional AI assistants, these agents can autonomously perform complex tasks, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specified goals.
A successful GenAI strategy starts with the right foundation. This framework helps organizations assess AI readiness across key areas—ensuring AI initiatives are aligned, scalable, and built for real impact
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!