Take Your Business to the Next Level with RPA
What is RPA?
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Robotic Process Automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on the motion of software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.
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In very simple terms, RPA robots, which are software robots, do the work that humans normally do. These robots are particularly adept at repetitive work such as controlling Desktop applications, collecting or gathering data, feeding data to other applications, manipulating data, processing transactions or triggering responses.
RPA bots are capable of mimicking most human-computer interactions to carry out legions of error-free tasks, at high volume and speed at very low cost.
What RPA can do for Your Business
Transferring data
Transferring data from one program or website into another
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Example
Entering data from AP invoices into an ERP package or scraping data from a website into a database or vice versa.
Extracting data
Extracting data from hard copy or software package to perform calculations
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Examples
extracting payroll details from handwritten time-sheets to calculate pay.
Processing forms
Example
Processing new account applications, ACC forms or insurance claims
Reconciliations
Example
Statement reconciliations., rent payment reconciliations.
Data cleansing
Example
Incorrect or missing data in CRM databases can be identified and corrected automatically to save laborious manual intervention
RPA Demo
Why Use RPA?
In essence, any business process that is usually repetitive and time-consuming can be delegated to a software robot through RPA technology. The tasks that are most suitable for replacement by software robots are those that are:
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Repetitive, have a pre-defined trigger and have sufficient volume
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Rules based
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Have defined inputs and outputs.
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The Benefits of RPA
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Cost savings - the automation usually leads to massive savings in labour resulting in higher productivity and reduced operating costs.*
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Accuracy - a software robot can usually achieve much higher accuracy than humans resulting in higher quality and better customer satisfaction
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Consistency - a software robot can work continuously without fatigue, rest or complaint which means that deadlines are more likely to be met
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Speed - a software robot works at many times the speed of humans
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Job enrichment - the technology allows employees to offload monotonous work to robots so that they can attend to higher value tasks
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Improved compliance - all RPA steps are recorded and auditable.
* As an example, an analysis of six NZ pharmacies shows that they can reduce up to 80% of the manual labour in prescription entry at the cost of only 40-50% of that labour. A pharmacy paying say $200,000 in annual labour for script punching therefore can save up to $100,000 pa.
Who will benefit from RPA?
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RPA can be used across all industries, from financial services, health, retail, education, energy, utilities, telecoms and manufacturing. It is flexible and scalable.
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RPA is beneficial to any industry or business running processes that are usually repetitive, time-consuming and rules-based.
Who are the Major Players for RPA?
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The three largest vendors of RPA software in the world are UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.
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HTG has chosen to partner with UiPath because it is arguably the fastest-growing enterprise software company in history with its recent success driven by its community of 250,000 users.
Steps for Implementing RPA
Process
identification
Look for processes where people are forced to perform low-value-added or monotonous work. In many businesses, examples of such work include Accounts Payable data entry, bank statement reconciliation, timesheet data entry and payroll processing, insurance claims processing and credit checking.
Capture process steps & Costs/benefits analysis
With the help of RPA experts, the next step is to capture the process steps from which the experts should be able to produce an estimated costs/benefits analysis.
Develop proof of concept
If the costs/benefits exercise is positive, then engage the RPA experts to develop a proof of concept and pilot the technology. During the pilot, if any errors occur, refine the solution and make final modifications.
Implementation
During this phase, the RPA bot is deployed in the production environment.