10 RPA Application Areas that You Can Implement in Your Company
The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is predicted to reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33%, hitting $6.22 billion by 2025.
Companies in various industries like finance and banking, logistics and distribution, retail, healthcare, legal and utilities have also been aggressively investing in RPA to gain a considerable competitive advantage in today’s digital era.
As it automates repetitive, time-consuming and high-volume tasks through software robots (“bots”), RPA serves as a virtual workforce extension that enables businesses like yours to:
- boost productivity
- improve internal efficiencies and
- reduce operational costs.
Most importantly, RPA aims to speed up how work is accomplished so your team can focus more on value-adding projects to grow the business.
But where exactly can you optimise RPA?
What areas of your business can benefit the most from RPA’s implementation?
Let’s find out.
What are the application areas of RPA?
The success of RPA lies in the selection of the right business processes, tasks and activities to automate.
But while there are important factors you must always consider when adopting automation, we have compiled a quick list of 10 main application areas here to give you an idea of where and how to fully take advantage of RPA in business.
- Operational activities in sales
Sales is an important function for all sorts of businesses, irrespective of size or sector. To hit sales targets, your sales team need to focus on closing more deals rather than wasting their time and energy on operational activities that come along with it.
An automation technology like RPA can handle these admin activities on your sales team’s behalf. From data replication, invoice preparation and delivery to the smooth updating of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, RPA reduces the need for manual labour while also minimising the risk of clerical mistakes that can displease customers.
- Procure-to-pay
RPA can also be utilised to streamline procurement processes. In fact, RPA enhances the interaction between the purchasing department and the accounts payable department as it prevents delays and errors from happening in between.
- Portal queries
Through the power of RPA, bots can be used to link all of your portals, providing employees with direct access to compiled data. These bots can also be utilised for automatic logins, file searching and downloads, as well as for updating information in the portal.
RPA also enables you to automate interactions with the portal, making it easy to respond to the queries of suppliers and customers alike.
- Data extraction
Data entry is the nightmare of monotony for your employees. Fortunately, RPA drastically reduces the need for manual data entry.
RPA has the capacity for basic pattern recognition. It can convert pretty much any kind of text into editable and searchable machine-encoded text, creating fewer errors and faster results that prevent employees from becoming exhausted or bored.
- Reconciliation
The main objective of reconciliation is for your accounting records to be error- and omission-free. So, doing a comparison of documents (for instance: the cash book and the bank statement) is necessary to ensure the reliability of records.
Software robots can perform data extraction from records like bank statements, thereby augmenting the likelihood of accurate comparisons. By finding and approving matching orders, RPA bots can also reconcile purchase orders with a delivery note. Using this, you can ensure the compatibility of orders and deliveries easily.
- Price comparison
Software robots can help you keep track of fluctuating market prices.
That’s because RPA makes it easy to extract data for best pricing, efficiently collecting data from different vendors and compiling it into reports for smarter decision-making.
- Data management
Relevant data comes from a variety of sources such as personal records and files, operational performance datasheets, etc. They should be put together and analysed consistently, and then the results generated from them must be passed to the right business decision-makers.
This sounds simple but involves a lot of careful processing, with attention to a plethora of details. For humans, the process can be time-consuming and nerve-wracking. Software robots, on the other hand, can do it fast, correctly and without complaint.
- Payroll management
No one can deny the tediousness of the payroll function, especially because it has to be an error-free process. You probably would not want a face-to-face meeting with one of your managers who has been paid the salary of a janitor just because they happened to have the same name!
If your company relies on legacy systems a lot, adopting an up-to-date payroll software platform might also not come so easily. Fortunately, software bots can offer a great helping hand in automating the process.
- Auto-generation of reports
Regular reports are necessary for functional businesses, so that both the executives and lower-level employees can keep track of and align with what goes on in the company.
With RPA’s software bots, your team can efficiently put necessary data together – not just to prepare these reports but also to circulate them so that they promptly reach everybody. It’s not hard to see how this might ease the burden of compliance and help keep everyone in the loop.
- Customer service operations
Customer service is one of the most complex activities in a company, so we are certainly not saying that it could be left entirely in the hands of robots. However, a human-machine collaboration can greatly improve customer satisfaction while at the same time, make the task less stressful for your employees.
The simple, repetitive, high-frequency tasks (ex: making customer profiles or billing data available, updating customer profiles, etc) can be automated, thereby reducing customers’ waiting times and allowing your employees to take the most advantage of their human-specific communication skills.
RPA can help your business thrive in a lot of ways
These above activities in the commercial, financial, support and customer service functions of your business are such a great start, and yet are not the only place where RPA can be applied.
However, these 10 RPA application areas should give you a flavour of what software robots can actually do. They also give you a better idea about how to effectively implement RPA for your business’ success.
At CiGen, we partner with organisations like yours to help you achieve the full business benefits of digital automation and establish a flexible operational environment for your future growth.
Our ultimate goal is to energise organisations and the workforce of tomorrow as digital technologies increasingly evolve toward Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computational Intelligence (CI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Harness the true power of automation with CiGen On Demand
Our team of RPA specialists are here to ensure you reap all of the rewards of business automation, while we address all of the potential risks.
We even provide an affordable automation service to small and medium-sized businesses through our CiGen On Demand subscription solution, making it even easier for your business to harness the true power of automation and earn back your valuable time.
Contact us today for more information on how we can help your business to succeed through robotic process automation.
