RPA bot automation is becoming an essential solution for firms seeking accelerated growth. With robotic process automation (RPA) finding more applications in banking, manufacturing, retail, and e-commerce industries, the time has come to automate your workflow.
RPA has become an increasingly popular and fast-expanding industry due to the growth-oriented services it provides to businesses. In fact, 76% of organizations have adopted various automation solutions, most of them in response to the pandemic.
RPA solutions revolutionize repetitive tasks. To help you better understand how a business like yours could deploy RPA’s rules-based protocols, let’s learn what RPA bots are and what they can do for businesses.
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What Are RPA Bots?
Software robots, often called bots, automate operations that employees would otherwise perform inside RPA. Bot automation utilizes software robots to interact with applications, systems, and workflows, automating many operations without human worker intervention.
Take note that bots do not replace human employees, but take care of basic tasks to help people focus on more strategic, value-added initiatives. When you use small automation tools (robots) to simplify entire processes, that’s your RPA bot definition.
What Are the Types of RPA Bots?
You can use a few different types of bots during RPA, and each of them has various applications that help with business work.
Attended Bots
When robots assist workers in accomplishing redundant office chores more quickly and precisely, this is known as attended automation. When helping a customer open a new account, the bot may, for instance, automatically complete a form, or give personnel connections to data and real-time recommendations for the best course of action.
Because it usually takes up residence on your desktop, attended RPA is often referred to as a “desktop robot.”
You might use attended bots when you’re looking to:
- Accelerate and simplify the daily activities of employees.
- Streamline repetitive tasks requiring immediate human-system interaction
Unattended Bots
Unattended bot RPAs are server-based automation bots that completely automate tasks that do not require human involvement or judgment. This allows you to do automation anywhere, without the need to monitor them after deployment.
Examples of procedures handled by unattended RPA bots include the following:
- Creating an employment letter
- Updating a database with new customers’ contact information
- Extracting data from an invoice using optical character recognition
- Automating tasks that can be mapped in their entirety.
- Automating back-office processes
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)
Intelligent process automation is a new development in RPA. It incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which enables bots to learn, become more intelligent, and improve their ability to process non-linear tasks and unstructured data.
Several examples of IPA include the following:
- Image recognition
- Voicemail transcription (leveraging natural language processing)
- Handling invoices
- Process payment requests
- Structure the invoices
- Machine Learning
Other Bots To Utilize
You can also leverage the following kinds of bots:
- Website interaction bots: A website interaction bot can log into a website, navigate multiple pages, enter credentials, download files, and notify a human employee when it is ready.
- Data management bots: A data management robot can extract, manipulate, and utilize data from several sources. Utilize a data bot for activities such as data entry into numerous reports and PDF data extraction.
- Accounts payable bots: Robots can be programmed to process e-bills automatically upon receipt. The robots will never lose track of a form or make an error in their calculations.
The majority of businesses may profit from combining attended and unattended automation. Doing so results in greater process efficiencies than using only one of the two methods. When completely unattended automation is not feasible, human staff can work alongside the robotic workforce to fully use bots.
How Do RPA Bots Work?
RPA bots may manage various processes, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. Typically, businesses adopt RPA technology to automate linear rule-based tasks, such as:
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- Surveying
- Form filling
- Invoicing
Regardless of the specific purpose of any bot, its workflow consists of four steps:
1. Triggering: A trigger is an event, condition, or series of them. It answers questions such as “How will the bot be launched?” or “ How will it execute?”
2. Input data acquisition: A bot is required to gather specific data before it can take action. These possible sources of information are:
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- Emails
- Spreadsheets
- CRM and ERP systems
- Databases
Modern RPA solutions can now provide Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology can detect and retrieve text from relevant fields in scanned documents for subsequent processing.
3. Input data transformation: This is the true objective of RPA bots. For instance, it may include:
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- Sorting emails
- Transcribing voicemails
- Preparing an invoice by populating the fields with data from various programs, such as CRM.
4. Output delivery. Once a bot completes its intended action, it must inform clients of the outcome. The report may be presented as:
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- An email
- A report in PDF, XLS, or any other format
- A generated dashboard
- An update in a database
- A notification in a messenger
What Can RPA Do for Businesses?
Robotic Process Automation bots have a snowball effect that benefits corporate operations and outcomes. From the very start, RPA can help businesses by:
- Reducing costs: The code-free interface makes bot-building easy and drives ROI. The average employee will recoup 40% of their daily time on manual tasks.
- Improving accuracy: No rework and near-perfect compliance with 100% precision. Financial services, healthcare, and life sciences can use RPA to accomplish compliance with bots’ reliability.
- Accelerating delivery: RPA bots boost employee productivity by expediting workflows and automating tasks. An RPA bot can handle form filling and claims processing in document-intensive businesses like finance, insurance, and the public sector.
- Utilize the power of artificial intelligence (AI): When AI is paired with RPA to create intelligent automation, the automation is multiplied by orders of magnitude. It is able to utilize 80% of unstructured company data.
This creates value as it gains traction and extends throughout the company. RPA enhances business outcomes like customer satisfaction and allows competitive advantages by releasing humans to do what they do best—problem-solving, process improvement, analysis, and other value-added tasks—resulting in increased employee engagement and new income prospects.
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When Do You Need RPA?
Equipping human employees with a digital workforce of software bots may increase productivity, enhance accuracy, and contribute to the expansion of your business. Here are some instances of how and where bot automation can be implemented within business processes.
The following are some possible applications, broken down by department.
- Finance:
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- Reporting and compliance with regulatory requirements
- Preparation for the financial review
- Standard entries in the journal
- Planning and analysis of financial matters
- IT
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- Help and service desk management
- Automation of networks and efforts to correct problems
- Installation as well as updates of software
- Management of information security based on roles
- HR
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- Provisioning for users
- Employee benefits and perks
- Employee information
- Administration of learning and development activities
- Accounting
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- Processing accounts payable
- Processing of customer accounts receivable
- The processing of invoices
- Sales/Marketing
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- Generation of reports
- Monitoring of websites and registration forms
- Social media automation
- Customer Service
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- Call center
- Customer emails
- Escalation management
Get the Most From Your RPA (and Bots)
Now you know what a bot is in RPA and how it can guide your business through the digital transformation.
In reality, however, each organization has unique RPA requirements, and can benefit from RPA differently. The best way to maximize this technology is to consult with an RPA professional who will evaluate your organization, assess your needs, and give recommendations.
RPA bots have the potential to save employees time and help them strike a better balance between their personal and professional lives.
1Rivet can help improve the efficiency of your business operations by automating labor-intensive tasks with RPA solutions that are both inexpensive and non-intrusive. Get back those lost hours. Call 1Rivet now and accelerate your future growth.