Automate Work Faster and More Easily With Robotic Process Automation

• Your organization has many business processes that rely on repetitive, routine manual data collection and processing work, and there is high stakeholder interest in automating them.
• You’re investigating whether robotic process automation (RPA) is a suitable technological enabler for automating such processes.
• Being a trending technology, especially with its association with artificial intelligence (AI), there is much marketing fluff, hype, and misunderstanding about RPA.
• Estimating the potential impact of RPA on business is difficult, as the relevant industry statistics often conflict each other and you aren’t sure how applicable it is to your business.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• There are no physical robots in RPA. RPA is about software “bots” that interact with applications as if they were human users to perform routine, repetitive work in your place. It’s for any business in any industry, not just for manufacturing.
• RPA is lightweight IT; it reduces the cost of entry, maintenance, and teardown of automation as well as the technological requirement of resources that maintain it, as it complements existing automation solutions in your toolkit.
• RPA is rules-based. While AI promises to relax the rigidity of rules, it adds business risks that are poorly understood by both businesses and subject-matter experts. Rules-based “RPA 1.0” is mature and may pose a stronger business case than AI-enabled RPA.
• RPA’s sweet spot is “swivel chair automation”: processes that require human workers to act as a conduit between several systems, moving between applications, manually keying, re-keying, copying, and pasting information. A bot can take their place.

Impact and Result

• Discover RPA and how it differentiates from other automation solutions.
• Understand the benefits and risks of complementing RPA with AI.
• Identify existing business processes best suited for automation with RPA.
• Communicate RPA’s potential business benefits to stakeholders.