Use of the RPA-Powered Digital Teammate Across Industries
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a cutting-edge technology created to optimize, boost, and improve various business processes performed by your employees.
What used to be a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone activity for your employees is now an optimized autonomous process that saves time instead of consuming it. Here, we’ll find the best processes for automation and talk about the industries in which they’re represented the most.
Is an RPA-Powered Digital Teammate Applicable for my Industry?
RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is a technology that focuses on processes instead of industries, as long as those processes are:
- Repetitive
- Time-consuming
- Manual
- Highly-frequent
- Handling structured data
Thus, the higher the frequency, the faster the ROI is. We can find such processes across every industry and department.
However, some industries have many processes that comply with the mentioned criteria, especially finances, insurance, manufacturing, hospitality, and retail.
Below, we’ll cover some of them and give an example of the best processes your Digital Teammate can take over.
Finance and Banking
Software robots are a perfect addition to your back-office team and can relieve your employees from mundane tasks. Above all, Digital Teammates will execute the processes faster and without human-made errors. They can work with any legacy application on the User Interface Level.
A great example of their utilization are:
- Invoice processing
- Accounts payable and accounts receivable
- Reporting
- Bank reconciliation
- Master data management
- Vendor and customer account creation
In the financial sector, it’s crucial to have accurate data available to provide top-quality service to your customers without delays.
A Digital Teammate is a highly beneficial addition to your team, as you’ll be able to handle more customers’ requests in a shorter time.
Insurance
In the Insurance industry, employees handle an enormous amount of sensitive data every day. Their work requires speed and accuracy while trying to avoid human-made errors that inevitably occur.
A great example of the processes you can consider automating are:
- Claims Registration and Processing
- Underwriting
- Regulatory Compliance
- Process and Business Analytics
- Policy Admin and Servicing
- Form Registration
- Policy Cancellation
- Sales and Distribution
- Finance and Accounts
- Integration with Legacy Applications
Telco
Telecoms can easily automate a majority of back-office activities, improve the quality of your employee’s tasks, and allow them to focus more on improving customer satisfaction.
For example, some of the process candidates for automation are:
- Database management
- Customer service management
- Purchase order management
- IT and infrastructure services, etc.
Retail
By utilizing the RPA-powered Digital Teammate, retailers can easily:
- Boost efficiency in existing operations
- Improve customer engagement across channels
- Reduce costs by refocusing staff on high-value tasks
- Improve customer experience
- Improve speed, quality, and accuracy of data
Even reports can be built faster, with more accuracy and agility for improved decision-making. That way, you’ll accurately handle more data in less time while reducing your operational time.
Utilities
Even the Utility Industry has many processes that would be beneficial to automate by implementing an RPA-powered Digital Teammate. Some of them are:
- Regulatory reporting
- Invoicing and settlement
- Billing & Dunning
- Contract management
- Credit/Debt Management
- Customer Service
- Reporting
- KPI monitoring
Manufacturing
With higher demand, manufacturers must invest in business modernization to keep on delivering on time. Other than investing in hardware, software robots are an essential investment, too.
Some of the perfect processes for automation in this industry are:
- Bill of Materials
- Administration and reporting
- Data migration
- Invoice processing
- Inventory control
- Regulatory compliance
Logistics
Logistics Industry handles an enormous amount of data that must be accurate, up-to-date, and available across various platforms.
Some processes that are perfect candidates for an RPA-powered Digital Teammate are:
- Data entry automation
- Predictive maintenance
- Logistics management
- After-sales service
- Initiating purchase orders
- Order management
- Supply chain diversity
Hospitality
In the hospitality industry, the focus is on your guests, and every activity that occupies your employees’ attention more than necessary can affect the overall customer satisfaction.
To free up their time, here’s a list of activities a Digital Teammate can help with:
- Room reservations
- Front desk operations
- Room service and billing requests
- Automated check-in and check-out
- Online reservations management
- Concierge recommendation
- Customer reviews analysis
Other than that, you can automate processes in HR, Finances, Maintenance, Logistics, etc., to make all of your operations faster and smoother.
Conclusion
Even though RPA is industry-agnostic, some sectors are leaders in implementing new technologies, such as RPA.
However, there is always more room for automation, depending on the level of digitalization in the company. Additionally, other than increased ROI, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, you’re improving employee satisfaction, too, leading to better employee retention. Consequently, such investment will reflect in all segments of your work – from the financial aspect to employees and customer satisfaction.
Web Browser Automation With an RPA-Powered Digital Teammate
In many business processes, employees use web browsers to acquire specific data, from filling out forms to logging in, downloading files, clicking buttons, or any other action the process may require.
Depending on the task at hand, this process can be time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone, often leading to false and inaccurate data – possibly even requiring re-doing the entire process from the beginning.
Writing a Custom Script for Web Browser Automation
You can write a new script or edit the existing one for every browser-related process you want to automate. Yet this is expensive and time-consuming, thus inefficient.
Also, the reliability of writing a custom script is questionable. Each script must be high quality to have an effective automated process, and writing a high-quality script is demanding.
When you’re writing multiple scripts – imagine how many errors you would miss, how much googling you would have to do, and so on.
If we consider the factors above, scalability and efficiency are out of the equation from the get-go.
Automating the Browser and Other Applications With One Tool
Many business processes include legacy applications that are by default difficult to automate with a majority of BPA tools, even more so if the process consists of browser-based actions. People are thus required to dedicate their time, effort, and energy to fill in the gaps.
Once in a while, human intervention is acceptable. However, if the process demands more engagement than the occasional intervention, employees waste their precious time on trivial tasks. With an RPA-powered Digital Teammate, these business processes become easily automated.
It’s a long-known fact that human value lies in intelligence, creativity, intuition, and decision-making. Performing repetitive, mundane, and manual tasks – especially time-consuming ones – undermines your employees’ value and efficiency. People perform best when allowed to do challenging, dynamic activities and invest in their professional interests.
A Digital Teammate, Ready to Jump In
Even though companies struggle to increase productivity, they often overlook alternative approaches while relying on humans to execute the entire business process.
Today, there are many ways of automating business processes, all of which usually involve one common feature – a Digital Teammate.
A Digital Teammate connects various activities and executes every manual, repetitive, time-consuming process that uses structured data – from browser manipulation to data management in different applications. Additionally, Digital Teammates, or software robots, are available 24/7, even when you’re enjoying your weekend or holiday.
Return of Investment?
Your employees’ paychecks are, in most cases, earned and well deserved. Investing in a Digital Teammate would increase your employees’ efficiency and satisfaction, allowing them to focus on other talents that provide more value to the company.
The win-win situation here is undeniable, both for the employees and the company itself.
To Wrap it Up
Today, almost every business process is browser-related, making it challenging to automate a specific part of the process, especially when other applications are involved.
Traditional browser automation techniques are inefficient, leaving the process half-automated. In other words, people still need to perform manual, repetitive, and time-consuming activities.
However, new technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), automate processes from beginning to end, allowing us to focus on the activities we love most.