Intelligent Automation Starts with Effective RPA

AI and Machine Learning techniques have been used to automate human tasks for several years. Simulating the human thought process using computer vision and language and speech recognition technology helps solve many interesting challenges across industries such as banking, insurance, legal, and more.

From automated classification and summarization of legal documents to automating data entry tasks and abstraction of critical customer data – automation finds many use cases in the business world. But as the demand for intelligent automation grows, enterprises must determine if they are prepared for the next wave of innovation. Read on to learn about the current RPA scenario and how it sets the foundation for intelligent automation.

RPA has been around for decades, but its popularity has grown manifold in the last few years. By automating mundane, repetitive, error-prone, and rule-driven tasks that people normally do, RPA helps organizations make decisions or follow rules based on precise conditions.

So, what makes RPA so beneficial? Organizations no longer need an enormous workforce to carry out day-to-day tasks. They can implement RPA across any apt business use case for clear and visible impact. Skilled experts or competent programmers wield RPA technologies to build complex systems from scratch and run them continuously. All you need is an understanding of how people are currently doing their work and then train bots to do these tasks.

Over the years, RPA can be enormously successful for organizations that deploy it. For instance,

• Banking organizations can use RPA bots to automatically copy and paste
• Customer data into various processing systems and accelerate the KYC process
• IT organizations can leverage RPA to monitor servers and networks and get alerts when performance falls below a threshold.
• Internal support teams can use RPA to send automated emails to users to reset their passwords as their password expiry date approaches.
• Retail companies can exploit RPA to automate the complex purchase-to-pay lifecycle, including vendor master creation, requisition, supplier requests, and purchase order management.
• HR teams can embrace RPA to automate complex yet critical tasks across time and attendance management, payroll, employee onboarding and offboarding, etc.

Automation is used across many industries today to minimize manual intervention, improve accuracy, and accelerate decision-making. But repetitive tasks don’t live in isolation; they are a foundational part of a more extensive process crucial to any company’s operations. That’s where intelligent automation comes in.

As organizations look to reduce the dependence on humans, combining automation with evolving technologies such as AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and others can further minimize human effort and boost efficiency like never before.

Intelligent automation, a combination of RPA and AI, can greatly empower rapid end-to-end business process automation and speed up digital transformation. It extends the horizons of standard automation, allowing organizations to automate higher-order tasks that otherwise require human judgment and perception. Instead of a rules-based approach, it empowers organizations to take a data-driven approach, evolving from just “doing” to “thinking”.

Let’s look at an actual use case. Consider the accounts payable process, which comprises several steps, from extracting data from invoices to entering it into various systems, validating payment requests, and paying bills. While RPA can help automate specific tasks like data entry, invoice matching, and payment execution, it does so in isolation.

Combined with other intelligent technologies like AI and cognitive intelligence, it can enable end-to-end automation while making human-like decisions along the way, such as approving/rejecting requests, inspecting goods, and releasing payments. In short, it enables the automation of the entire process, including the steps humans have long taken.

Here’s how RPA forms the first step in enabling cognitive automation and building the foundation of intelligent automation:

• RPA represents a strategic investment in intelligent automation, enabling organizations to combine AI with cognitive capabilities – thus improving and extending the capabilities of standard automation.
• It further minimizes human involvement in decision-making, enhancing the accuracy of complex operations involving unstructured information.
• By acting as a bridge across various systems, RPA helps orchestrate and automate the workflow of a process in its entirety and uses a combination of many intelligent technologies to create synergies that deliver results greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Today, enterprises that perform daily tasks manually suffer from efficiency-related problems. If you find that inefficiencies have started to hamper your business performance, it is time to build a strong foundation of intelligent automation using RPA.

Whether you belong to the retail, banking, or insurance industry, enabling intelligent automation across your growing enterprise can offer several benefits. Automating tedious and time-consuming tasks can minimize human error, increase efficiency, and free up your skilled workforce to work on strategic tasks.

Such automation can help enhance productivity, allowing employees to tackle pressing issues more valuable to your organization’s mission and goals. It can also lead to higher employee engagement, greater accuracy, and prevention of missed opportunities and faulty decision-making. Talk to us today to understand not only how to embrace RPA for business impact but also how to do so in a scalable and strategic manner.