What Has RPA Delivered to Date?

Robotic Process Automation has been successful in automating in an around existing process and application portfolios for 20 plus years and has recently stole the spotlight. RPA is being talked about at the executive levels because automation is a big deal for organizations wanting to deliver efficiency. Now that organizations are headed for effectiveness with better customer experiences RPA will have to shift and change to head for these new outcomes. What have the bots been up to until now?

Technical Delivery to Date:

RPA is great for any kind automated keying replacing drudgery work by managing data entry from one system to another without having humans to deal with signing in to applications and searching for data sources. RPA can also tap external resources like web sites and multiple data feeds. Any light data integration, transformation, replication and movement has been RPAs sweet spot. RPA also plays a role with dealing with content (text mostly) and emails for the integration of collaboration facilities with system components that are of a software nature mostly. In some ideal situations RPA can escort and extend straight through processes activity while monitoring the results to adjust the throughput through rule changes. In the near future, IoT linkages to processes may also include physical bots as well. Needless to say the technical delivery has been strong to date and still growing.

Business Delivery to Date: 

RPA has played a big role in several business situations particularly processes in an around finance because finance is often a large consumer of data. Human resources is content rich and ends up being a communication hub for selection and on-boarding of new associates. On boarding requires contacting many internal systems for resources and security authorizations. Great customer service requires tapping many systems to reach the outcomes that please customers by reaching their desired outcomes. RPA can help service reps span systems or assist self servicing situations.  Technical support also handles a variety of problems that is a ripe situation for RPA to link to a variety of internal systems. Procurement is also a process that requires multiple internal and external collaborations and system interactions. The industries that have been the most aggressive with RPA to date are Banking, Insurance, Telecom and Retail, but there is potential all around us.

Bring on the Complexity and Change: 

RPA is ready to surge into new tasks with the addition of intelligence with AI and process mining capabilities that are also enabled with AI. Intelligence in and around RPA can take on more complex work tasks. Automation of all kind will leverage intelligence along with RPA, so the future of automation seems to have unlimited potential. Intelligent automation will be the next big thing and RPA will be at the party.

Net; Net: 

RPA has and will continue to deliver results and looks to have a long life even if under the umbrella of intelligent automation. RPA is one of the easiest places to start and plays well in all incremental like projects(Scrum based or not) that are dominating the scene today with low-code, workflow and process management.


Additional Reading:

Process n RPA
Future of RPA
Top 5 RPA On Ramps