For years, businesses chased the holy grail of better, faster, and cheaper to beat their competitors and dominate in their sectors.
Over time, the pace of innovation and growth grew, but things on the work front...not so much. Employees still devoted 60% of their time to rote, repetitive tasks instead of more productive, high-value work.
The pathway to bringing robotic process automation (RPA) into the office started in the early 2000s. But it was the acceleration of efficiency, convenience, and speed that made 78% of business leaders implement RPA. And another 16% plan to do so by 2023.
So, what makes RPA so popular? How can it transform your business? And how do you prepare for—and implement—this rapidly evolving automation technology?
We’ll cover the benefits of robotic process automation and how to use it to scale your business.
What is RPA and how does it work?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a tool employed in digital systems to automate repetitive, low-value, rule-based tasks and make them more efficient.
The technology uses software robots or “bots” to perform rote, rule-based tasks in legacy systems requiring little to no human involvement or intelligence.
These bots interact with and adapt to any interface or workflow the same way people do. They learn, mimic, and execute selected tasks or transaction steps performed by human employees, except bots work faster, with 100% reliability and precision.
For the best results, automate processes that are:
- Consistent (don’t change over time)
- Prone to error
- Predictable
- Time-critical and seasonal
- Free of human involvement
Tasks like copy-paste, data entry, filling forms, parsing emails, onboarding new hires, moving files, or processing invoices make great candidates for RPA.
Then anyone on your team can learn to build, edit, and run their own automation.
RPA enables technical and non-technical employees to create bots by observing human digital actions. Just show the bots what to do and let them work their magic in your business operations.
So, what can RPA do for your business? Let’s explore its benefits.
What are the benefits of RPA?
Whether you want to speed up time to market or increase sales and revenue, automation can help you achieve it. Here are some advantages of implementing RPA in your business.
Greater accuracy
RPA delivers 100% accuracy, consistency, and precision right out of the gate. As it picks up momentum and covers more business processes across the organization, RPA keeps adding value to your business, employees, and customers.
Cost reduction
Automation cuts operational costs significantly. For example, a financial services company that used Inscribe to automate manual document reviews and fraud detection saves $100K each month.
Better quality
RPA bots handle tasks effectively and error-free. This directly reflects the quality of your products or services, resulting in actual cost savings (and increased revenue).
Increased employee productivity and engagement
RPA frees your employees to focus on high-value work—conducting analysis, improving processes, and solving problems by taking over repetitive operational tasks. This increases their productivity and leads to a more engaged workforce.
Scalability
RPA software makes your business easily scalable. Software robots ramp up quickly to match seasonal workloads. If your organization is dynamic, you won’t need to hire a dedicated team of specialists to meet significant demand spikes.
Lessen compliance burdens
Failure to comply with industry regulations and policies can have many negative consequences, including paying hefty fines, reputational damage, and lost revenue.
But hiring more people to reduce the regulatory burden doesn’t solve the problem. RPA automates the labor-intensive compliance process, reducing the risks and costs.
Highly regulated onboarding functions like customer due diligence (CDD) and know your customer (KYC) help banks assess new customer risk, as well as determine which products and relationships to develop with them.
RPA automates CDD and KYC processes to:
- Reduce customer onboarding time
- Digitize the onboarding experience
- Improve the quality of due diligence
Improved customer experience
Robots process large amounts of data, making them more efficient than human employees. This leads to improved customer service and satisfaction, translating to higher revenue for your business.
Maintains an audit trail
Robotic process automation performs repetitive tasks in your business processes while providing log files of the work performed and process details (date, timestamp, bot/process name, etc).
You can quickly identify anomalies when the output of a process delivers unexpected results and improve workflows for better service delivery. It’s also easier for you to recover your data in case of unforeseen outages or shutdowns.
Drives increased innovation
Robots handle the dreary, menial tasks so you can leverage your employees' complete focus and brainpower.
Workers can use their creativity and skills on value-adding business tasks bots can’t replicate. RPA spurs product innovation while increasing engagement and workplace satisfaction.
Delivery speed
RPA bots work uninterrupted 24/7/365, speeding up your business processes significantly. As they continuously learn your methods, their performance will become more enhanced, resulting in a faster time to market.
Examples of industry-specific benefits of RPA
Now that you understand how RPA contributes to your organization’s efficiency and growth, let’s look at how robotic process automation benefits businesses in different industries.
Robotic Process Automation for finance
RPA helps financial institutions achieve the desired efficiency by catering to changing consumer demands.
For example, in the banking sector, there are many subsidiary segments dedicated to improving, managing, and growing customers’ investments.
Retail, commercial, or capital banking and similar industries gather and use sensitive customer data that’s vulnerable to fraudulent transactions. This adds unnecessary financial risks and can be detrimental for clients who have entrusted their wealth to banks.
For instance, in 2021, 17.46% of global e-commerce transactions were potentially fraudulent. Then we saw another 19.66% transactions in the U.S. were duplicitous. Many consumers who shopped between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday fell victim to cyber theft and banks faced tremendous financial risks.
So by adopting RPA solutions, financial institutions can:
- Streamline financial processes and reduce unnecessary expenditures.
- Find patterns in workflows, detect fraudulent activities or piracies, and notify concerned parties of plausible threats.
- Eliminate human clerical errors in high-risk processes involving critical data.
- Flag high-value transactions and check for disparities before crimes occur.
- Automate temporary customer account block removals without human intervention.
- Identify fraudulent charges, making it easier for financial institutions to reclaim them.
- Maintain a detailed audit trail for each transaction and settlement, making the auditing process easier.
Robotic Process Automation for insurance
Insurers across the globe have a tough time balancing between providing high standards of customer satisfaction and maintaining the bottom line.
Traditionally, the insurance industry depended on information provided by claimants and investigators. This manual process contributed to insurance fraud, one of the largest crimes in the U.S., with at least $80 billion stolen annually.
Together with technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), automation transforms the data collection and analysis processes by:
- Opening new avenues for real-time data collection.
- Making it easier to predict future events.
- Expediting response times.
The result: reduced claims costs, enhanced operational reporting, improved customer experiences, and better business outcomes.
RPA bots execute repetitive, rule-based, high-volume administrative and transactional tasks, such as data entry, claims processing, and policy application handling. In the claims processing and management area, RPA helps insurers:
- Find efficiencies in the repetitive, data-intensive claims registration process.
- Eliminate inefficiencies for claims adjusters.
- Fast track the data preparation process for claims estimation and analysis.
- Detect and manage insurance fraud activity.
- Process bulk claim payments quickly and efficiently.
For example, Liberty Mutual insurance company wanted to automate their data center, which lacked speed, optimization, and consistency. In the long run, this deficit hurt the company—especially with their customer experience.
It implemented automation to its overall business operations, including general, non-production workloads. After a successful pilot program, automation became the core backbone running many of the critical business systems across the company.
Automation helped Liberty Mutual insurance:
- Cut down the company’s processes to real-time or a couple of hours.
- Eliminate inconsistencies in their manual tasks.
- Optimize its employees to drive the business in other facets.
Get ahead with robotic process automation
Is RPA worth the hype that surrounds it?
Absolutely.
From reducing costs to detecting fraud and improving the customer experience—RPA delivers great results and a high return on investment. In fact, Inscribe is helping fintechs and financial services businesses detect and prevent $80M in fraud monthly.
Need help with implementing RPA in your business?
Talk to an Inscribe expert to find out how to develop an RPA strategy and kickstart your automation journey.
