For businesses looking to grow, automation is becoming a critical solution. With robotic process automation (RPA) use cases erupting from industries like banking, manufacturing, retail, and ecommerce, it is time that you make the most out of automating your workflow.
Automation can replace time-consuming and manual tasks that are chewing up a high volume of labor hours in your workforce, allowing you to redirect those resources into other tasks that increase your bottom line.
When you implement machine learning or robotic process automation (RPA) in your organization, you will realize a return on investment (ROI) by reducing both soft and hard costs of manual errors. improving your business processes, and boosting the productivity of your workforce.
RPA is a hot, rapidly growing industry because of the services it offers companies looking to grow. But to best illustrate how a company like yours could implement RPA rules-based processes, let’s examine a few use cases for RPA.
10 RPA Automation Use Case Examples You Should Know About
While RPA has a wide variety of potential applications, here are 10 RPA use cases in various industries that provide the best examples of practical applications at a range of businesses.
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RPA Use Case No. 1: Customer Service Operations
Customer service is the most common robotic process automation use case. Customers want a speedy response, and you will often find that many of their requests are largely the same.
An RPA system can collect customer queries, sort them into categories, and then send an initial response to let the customer know that you are working on that query. Then, the right customer care professional can tackle one category of queries and get through them faster.
Another part of this RPA use case example is automated access to a knowledge base: repetitive inquiries need the same answers, and easy access gets your customer the information they need faster.
RPA Use Case No. 2: Payroll
Payroll and other financial services include highly repetitive tasks that eat up many hours each month for your team. RPA solutions can process and validate timesheets, create paychecks, and process reimbursements.
Then there are all of the little things that happen throughout the month that can take up time, such as small changes to records caused by a raise in salary or an address change. RPA bots automatically make these changes, so you don’t have an employee wasting time by going into the system to make the updates manually every time they happen.
RPA Use Case No. 3: Human Resources
RPA has broader implications for your human resources department beyond just payroll, though. A huge amount of data comes through the HR department, and you need to track this information.
This would be time-consuming to do manually, but it takes no time at all with an RPA system doing the work. Such a system can organize all of your employee history, training levels, and other information in one place.
RPA also handles the off-boarding process for departing employees, manages travel expenses, and creates reports on your personnel that allow you to make sound business decisions about your workforce.
RPA Use Case No. 4: Data Management
You need easy access to your business’s data to truly understand how your business is performing, and if you need to make adjustments. RPA software improves data entry and organization, so you can easily access it and turn it into actionable reports.
For many companies, managing data is a huge part of fundamental business activities. For example, an insurance company could save a massive amount of time by automating many of their underwriting processes by having an RPA system analyze data and determine risks.
You can also use an RPA system to take deep dives into customer demographics, purchase history, preferences, and anything else that will give you clues on what products you should offer and how you should market.
RPA Use Case No. 5: Invoices and Sales Orders
Many businesses handle invoice processing and sales orders manually, but this is another process ripe for RPA automation. This not only saves time, you’ll also reduce potentially costly errors.
An RPA system can automatically process invoices and handle sales order entry. The system is able to organize and maintain a database of information for all of your invoices and orders so you will always be organized.
RPA Use Case No. 6: Fraud Detection
Unchecked fraud can cost your company big time, but an RPA system can keep a watch out for it. For example, banks are able to use automation to identify accounts that may be threats and flag them for a more manual review that would require human intervention. This wouldn’t be possible if you hired people to manually check each account.
RPA Use Case No. 7: Quality Control
Yes, RPA can also improve the quality of your products. Your business can use RPA to automate and streamline the testing of your products.
For example, a lot of testing involves manual tasks like clicking on software, which is something that could be outsourced to an RPA system. These tasks can be a major time suck for your workforce. Passing it along to an RPA system has immediate time-saving benefits.
RPA Use Case No. 8: Price Comparison
One way to boost profits is to cut expenses, and automation can help do that not just by reducing the need for manual labor, but also by helping companies find the best deals.
For example, a manufacturer that needs to purchase raw materials can use RPA to automatically compare prices from different vendors in the supply chain to determine the best deal for the company. Even small savings can add up over the long run, and especially with large bulk orders. By extension, this is an increasingly popular area for RPA systems.
RPA Use Case No. 9: Information Technology
Most businesses have an information technology (IT) department—another area ripe for automation. An RPA system can automatically manage your IT network and authorized users. These solutions can alleviate the demands on your IT department to run your company’s network, which adds to the bottom line.
RPA Use Case No. 10: Data Scraping
RPA systems not only manage your data, they can go out and grab data from elsewhere that is useful to your business.
RPA can scrape stock trading websites or news sites for information that is relevant to your industry. This information can be used in reports and inform business decision-making. In addition to saving employee time on manually doing this work, an RPA process is more likely to find information that a human being might miss.
From Automation Use Case to Practical Solution: Find Out How to Implement Robotic Process Automation Now
It’s fine to talk about RPA as a concept, but it’s another thing to digitally transform your business with RPA. The truth is, every company has different needs and benefits from different types of RPA. You need to talk to an RPA expert who can take a look at your business, listen to your needs, and make some recommendations.
At 1Rivet, that’s what we do. We streamline enterprise operations with low-cost, non-intrusive RPA services to automate processes that eat your workforce’s hours. Reclaim those hours tomorrow by talking to us today, and set your business up for future growth.