How much time do your accounts team spend retrieving invoices from various emails/platforms to upload them to your accounting system? How much time do your customer support agents spend extracting data from forms sent over by clients? How much precious time is spent every year sitting at one’s desk – doing repetitive manual tasks – extracting data from documents, emails and forms – and copy pasting them to Excel sheets?
These and many other similar processes can all be automated through RPA.
Robotic Process Automation is the technology that allows you to have computer software (i.e. a “robot”) that emulates and integrates the actions of a human interacting within digital systems – to execute a business process.
RPA robots utilise the user interface to capture data and manipulate applications just like us humans do. They interpret, trigger responses and communicate with other systems in order to perform on a vast variety of repetitive tasks. And they can do it FASTER & BETTER – an RPA software robot never sleeps and makes zero mistakes.
In contrast to other traditional IT solutions, RPA allows organisations to automate at a fraction of the cost and time, previously impossible. RPA is also non-intrusive in nature and leverages the existing infrastructure without causing disruption to your underlying systems, which would be difficult and costly to replace. With RPA, cost efficiency and compliance are no longer an operating cost but a byproduct of the automation.
Here are 10 ways RPA software robots can work for you. They can…
- Log into any application and retrieve something for you
- Read and work on any frontend application
- Call external APIs and retrieve/store data for you
- Copy and paste data from one application to another
- Move files and folders, even if this involves FTPing files or sending them to an API
- Extract data from documents, PDFs, emails, forms and any web/desktop application
- Connect to your email boxes and retrieve information from there
- Interconnect diverse business systems that were not designed to communicate with each other
- Scan, read and even compose/send e-mails
- Analyse data and take action on the results
Let’s take a closer look at two scenario where RPA software robots can help…
Scenario 1 : Retrieving Invoices From Emails/Portals : it is very common that invoices are sent via email these days. Your inbox has links/pdfs of the various Google Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Go Daddy, Netflix, Zoom, cloud providers, airline tickets, mobile phone bills, internet provider bills, hotel bookings, taxi companies, the list is endless, and you have to go around the various emails or the various portals to download the invoices, and insert them into the accounting system. Alternatively an RPA robot can fetch documents/data from different sources in seconds – and it can go even further – to automatically approve valid invoices and even trigger a financial transfer. An RPA software robot can do this for you 24/7 without errors.
Scenario 2 : Forms Sent To The Customer Support Team : it is equally common that customer support staff find themselves repeatedly dealing with filled-in forms sent over by the clients. Documents arrive via email to one of the customer support agents. The agent will take note of its contents, compile it and save it to some other system. Just imagine how much time is spent in one year on such a process. And can you imagine the human errors that occur in the process? An RPA software robot can do this for you 24/7 without errors.
Visible ROI In A Short Time – Win – Win – Win
Implementing RPA is not a complex process. Depending on the task at hand a typical deployment could take just 3 weeks. The investments in the RPA bots will give back positive ROI in a relatively short time. You free up your staff from repetitive work – making them happier at their job. The repetitive jobs at their desk are passed on to the RPA bots. This would improve the team KPIs and at the same time reduce the risk of human error.
Staff win – they are happier with more time for key tasks.
Customers win – they receive a faster, error free service.
Company wins – with lower costs, faster turnaround times, less human errors.
RPA creates a WIN – WIN – WIN scenario.
If you want to learn more about RPA feel free to contact us. We offer FREE no-obligation consultation about RPA and other automation technologies.