RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. It is a process automation concept which allows business users to automate their tasks with minimal help from technical teams. We all are familiar with automation and have done it in some or the other form in our lives. May it be scheduling an event or automating test cases using tools like Silk, Selenium or some scripting language. While test case automation is relevant for technical teams, the business teams have very low relevance for this kind of automation.
So, RPA is not for technical folks?
Yes, you are right. Primary benefit of RPA is for business users. Think like your clerical team is getting additional hand – a robotic hand – to do all the mechanical, mundane work. Typically your back office teams end up doing tasks which are of repetitive nature. Any repetitive task done by a human is prone to errors as well as delays due to boredom. However, RPA helps businesses automate such tasks and get the human beings to do some intelligent tasks such as direct customer interactions, which in turn prove beneficial for the business Growth.
What All Things RPA can do?
RPA can read data from various sources such as emails or excel files, process them and then put into your application in a required format. Once the RPA software is trained to do this, it will continue to execute as long as we want, without any errors or delays. Typical RPA softwares can read emails, excel files. You can train those software on your data entry software to enter data read from email or excel file. If you need, RPA can also open websites and extract data in the format that you want.
The RPA software is termed as “low-code” or “no-code”. This is primarily because they do not need much coding. Even business users can configure and train the RPA software to perform the required tasks and to do it repetitively.
Essentially RPA implementation can give you huge benefits in terms of time savings, cost savings, error free data entry and thus overall process efficiency.
Use Case
Consider a case where backoffice worker receives address verification request from companies agent over email. The worker needs to open that email, read address and attachment. She would need to verify address details from third party application or website and then make a phone call for contact number verification. Currently, a human worker does all these tasks. With RPA, all of this could be done by a software.
RPA software providers:
- Automation Anywhere
- BluePrism
- BlackLine
- Datamatics
- …
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Related Keywords
Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management (BPM), Robotics