Why has Robotic Process Automation become so popular?
Robotic Process Automation has rapidly emerged as THE force driving business transformation and according to Gartner, RPA has occupied a top two spot for the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market for 5 years in succession.
With the growth of Business Process Management (BPM) in the ‘90s, prominent Tech companies of the time (such as IBM, Oracle, etc) started developing automation technologies to help optimise end-to-end processes. RPA is regarded as the “next step” in the development of Business Process Automation, emerging as a ‘stand-alone’ automation tool in the late 1990’s. After 15 years of gradual adoption, the global RPA market was valued at approximately US$ 200 million. But since 2015, RPA has seen exponential global growth, reaching US$ 1 billion in 2019, US$ 2 billion by 2021, and almost US$ 4 billion in 2023.
With RPA currently averaging a year-on-year growth rate of nearly 50% globally, conservative adoption
estimates exceed 30% annually for the next 3-5 years, with BRICS countries expected to exceed 39%.
Why the surge in RPA popularity?
Businesses are constantly being confronted with a multitude of external challenges and must consistently seek out inventive strategies to modernise their operations and remain competitive in a rapidly our rapidly market.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as a solution that can be implemented with minimal disruption to existing operations while allowing for quick execution2. More importantly, when compared to other process transformation approaches such as BPMS (Business Process Management Software) or BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), RPA results and benefits are tangible, identifiable, and quantifiable much faster with a noticeably lower cost of implementation.
Yes, the universal shift to remote work triggered by COVID, definitely contributed to the growth of intelligent automation, but a 2019 Deloitte survey showed that, even prior to COVID, organisations had already achieved an average cost reduction of 27% from their implementations. That represents a substantial saving and scenarios like remote work and hybrid work will further enhance that benefit.
Whether large or small, located in advanced or developing economies, the bottom line is that all businesses need to be more efficient in the use of the resources they have available to them. Efficiency drives competitiveness which in turn leads to sustainable micro- and macro-economic growth.
What sets RPA apart?
RPA involves the use of software robots (or bots) to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks, thereby enhancing efficiency, improving processing times, reducing errors, and enabling organisations to reallocate human resources to more strategic initiatives.
The surge in RPA adoption can be attributed to several factors:
- Cost Efficiency
RPA enables organisations to achieve significant, even ridiculous4, cost savings by automating labour-intensive tasks and maximising resource utilisation. - Agility & Adaptability
Being able to adapt to market changes can be simplified when processes are automated, allowing companies to modify or scale their systems (up or down) according to evolving business requirements and/or environments. - Productivity Enhancements
Through automating repetitive tasks, companies are able to reallocate core and critical resources to areas that offer more strategic and innovative enhancements, or simple things like accelerating project timelines. - Improved Audit & Regulatory Compliance
Compliance requirements are critical in many industries, and manual processes may lack the necessary controls and audit trails to ensure compliance. RPA enables organisations to enforce regulatory requirements, maintain comprehensive audit logs, and demonstrate compliance with confidence. It also allows organisations to report on compliance shortfalls with ease and without business interruption. - Error Reduction
Manual execution of tasks is susceptible to errors, which can lead to inefficiencies and compliance issues. RPA works to ensure accuracy and consistency in task execution, minimising the risk of errors and enhancing data integrity. - Scalability
RPA solutions are often highly scalable and capable of handling multiple tasks of varying complexities across multiple business units. We also find that organisational “silos” hamper cross-team collaboration and RPA helps businesses achieve “the results” without being burdened by “the politics.” - Integration Flexibility
Process Automation platforms offer seamless, and often simplified, methods of integration with existing systems and applications. This allows organisations to leverage their current IT infrastructure without significant redevelopment efforts. - Strategic Focus
By offloading repetitive tasks to RPA bots, employees can focus on more strategic initiatives that require creativity, critical thinking, and human judgment. This not only improves employee morale and job satisfaction but also drives innovation and competitive advantage for the organisation.
Deloitte’s survey found that once employees got past the “it will take my job” fear, 1 in 2 employees became actively involved in the design and implementation, and 16% wanted to actively pioneer the implementation. Remember, automation is not about replacing human employees; it is about augmenting their capabilities and improving overall operations in an ever-evolving business landscape. In fact, in the same survey, of the nine reasons given by business leaders for implementing RPA, not one was a reduction in staff.
The list of benefits continues but simply put, RPA not only improves internal operational efficiencies but also supports a company’s external presence with improved customer experiences (improved response times, etc) and improved external audit controls (ISO implementations can be enhanced), all with enhanced employee satisfaction.
What are the top 10 most popular business applications of RPA in the past 2 decades?
The beauty of RPA, and a key factor fuelling its growth, is its versatility across business sectors and within business functions. Robotic Process Automation works in any space where the business has a data transformation, manipulation or migration need that does not require significant cognitive decision-making or human judgment.
It, therefore, has widespread applications across sectors from finance & banking, pharma & healthcare to manufacturing, supply chain & logistics, and even retail & hospitality.
Across sectors, the top 10 most popular processes that are automated include:
- Data Entry and Data Migration: Updating Databases, Migrating & Integrating data from legacy systems, or populating operational forms are typical uses for RPA, ensuring accuracy and efficiency with minimal to no business interruption.
- Data & Web Scraping: Data & Web Scraping involves extracting data from web pages or documents for various purposes such as research, competitor analysis, reporting, and even trading (forex, etc). Very often this is an action performed on a daily, even hourly basis.
RPA can be triggered to perform actions such as User Interface interactivity, extracting, and compiling the data into your desired format. - Invoice Processing: RPA is capable of extracting data from expense invoices, validating it against predefined rules, and entering it into an accounting or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Similarly, RPA can be used to automate customer invoicing processes ensuring case management, customer quotes, order tracking, shipment tracking, and more are seamlessly integrated between ERP and CRM systems. This significantly reduces manual effort and errors in the end-to-end invoice processing cycle. - Customer Onboarding or Vendor Registrations: Each is usually a very laborious task. RPA accelerates this by automating form completion, identity verification, and compliance checks. For instance, in banking, RPA enhances new account openings by populating forms, verifying IDs, and completing compliance & credit checks, resulting in an improved customer experience and quicker time-to-market for financial products and services.
- Report Generation: Task-bots and RPA Workflows are able to generate reports by collecting data from multiple sources, performing calculations, and formatting the output according to predefined templates. Where management oversight or commentary requires human interaction, experience, and skills, attended RPA workflows can automate the timely flow of these interactions ensuring information is available to make data-driven decisions.
- Email Management: While standard mailing tools offer email sorting and categorisation, RPA enhances efficiency by not only automating these tasks but also extracting pertinent information from emails and updating other systems. For instance, RPA can parse5 customer feedback emails, extract relevant data, and update CRM systems, ensuring seamless integration across platforms and enhancing workflow automation.
- HR Processes: HR tasks, including employee onboarding, offboarding, payroll processing, leave management, compliance reporting, and even time & attendance data can be managed using RPA workflows. For example, in onboarding, RPA can automate form completion, background checks, and document verification, ensuring a seamless experience for recruits.
- Financial Closing and Reconciliation: Process Automation supports financial closing activities by automating areas such as reconciling accounts, verifying transactions, and generating financial statements. For accountants, RPA gives peace of mind regarding accuracy and compliance to GAAP & Regulatory Compliance.
- Supply Chain Management: Process Automation can optimise supply chain processes by automating tasks such as order processing, inventory management, and supplier communication. Demand Forecasting is also a popular use case. Since many RPA software solutions have machine learning automation capabilities, you could automate the data input, the loading and running of the learning model, and the use of the prediction output data in other automatic processes or visualise the output of your predictive models or trigger further actions as needed.
- Compliance Monitoring: RPA improves regulatory compliance by continuously monitoring data for adherence to industry regulations. For example, RPA can analyse shipping documents to ensure compliance with international trade laws and customs regulations. By identifying discrepancies or non-compliant activities, RPA helps mitigate risks and ensures smooth operations within the Logistics industry.
What are the Sector/Industry-specific RPA use cases?
As mentioned, the power of RPA lies in its ability to be tailored to the distinct requirements and nuances of virtually every organisation or Sector, allowing businesses to deploy solutions that can be adapted/adjusted to each of their unique needs and requirements.
From Banking & Insurance to Marketing & Business Development, from Manufacturing & Supply Chain to Healthcare & Finance, RPA has found applications across a wide range of industries, revolutionising traditional workflows, optimising business processes, and delivering tangible benefits.
Here are a few of the most popular examples for these business sectors
1. Banking
RPA is regularly employed in Banking to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and ensure regulatory compliance.
- Customer Onboarding:
By automating functions like data entry identity verification and compliance checks, RPA is able to accelerate customer onboarding, reducing onboarding times and improving customer satisfaction. - Loan Processing:
Loan origination, underwriting, and loan approval actions can be quite onerous to ensure risk mitigation. RPA can automate a fair portion of these steps, allowing for faster approvals/results, minimising manual errors, and reducing operational costs. - Fraud Detection and Prevention:
RPA helps to detect fraud by analysing transaction data in real-time, flagging suspicious activities, and triggering alerts for investigation. This leads to quicker reaction times to risk and suspicious behaviour.
2. Healthcare
In the healthcare industry, RPA has been leveraged to optimise clinical workflows, improve patient care, and streamline administrative processes. Some of the top automated processes include:
- Appointment Scheduling:
RPA bots manage appointment scheduling tasks by accessing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, checking physician availability, and sending appointment reminders to patients. This has reduced administrative burden and minimised no-shows. - Claims Processing:
Data extraction from medical claim forms, automated verification of insurance coverage, and claim submissions to insurance companies has had a significant impact in speeding up reimbursement cycles and reducing claim errors. - Patient Registration:
RPA assists in patient registration by capturing and validating patient information, updating EHR systems, and generating unique patient identifiers, improving data accuracy and compliance with regulatory standards.
3. Accounting & Finance
Finance is probably the most common sector for the implementation of RPA, and the area where the quickest wins (low-hanging fruit) are usually found.
- Accounts Payable (AP) and Accounts Receivable (AR) Management:
In AP, RPA is commonly used for data validation (PO Matching, GRN Verification, etc), route approvals or send reminders for approvals.
For AR, sending automated reminders or reconciling payments received, overdue tracking & reporting and even customer account updates are typically what is possible. - Financial Controls and Compliance:
RPA is able to validate transactions against predefined rules and flag anomalies. It can also perform day-end, month-end or period-end reconciliations supporting adherence to legal guidelines, fraud prevention, and internal controls. - Strategic Financial Planning:
Cash flow analyses, market dynamics, and financial targets are all possible with RPA and promoting informed Decision-making, Forecasting budget allocations and Investment strategies.
This is by no means exhaustive, Account Reconciliations, Automated Record Keeping, Payroll Processing, Transactional Payment Processing, and even Reporting are all possible with Robotic Process Automation.
4. Retail and e-Commerce
In the Retail and e-Commerce sector, RPA is used to optimise supply chain management, enhance customer experiences, and drive operational efficiency.
- Inventory Management:
Automating tasks such as stock replenishment, order processing, and demand forecasting, enables retailers to maintain optimal inventory levels, minimise stockouts, and improve order fulfilment rates. - Price Monitoring and Competitor Analysis:
Data/Web Scraping bots can monitor competitor pricing strategies, analyse market trends, and adjust pricing dynamically, enabling retailers to stay competitive, maximise profitability, and be proactive to market changes. - Customer Service:
RPA assists in customer service by automating responses to common inquiries, processing returns and refunds, and updating customer records.
5. Marketing & Business Development
RPA has certainly revolutionised the Marketing landscape, offering a suite of benefits that promote efficiency and drive results. It optimises time-consuming tasks such as data entry, lead generation, CRM updating and content distribution, freeing marketers to focus on strategy and creativity.
- Social Media Management:
Automating content scheduling, engagement tracking, and customer response helps with timely interactions and fostering brand loyalty. - Scheduled Email Marketing campaigns
List segmentation, mail scheduling, and personalised content creation take a considerable amount of time and therefore less interaction. Automating these steps has led to higher open and conversion rates. - Data collection & collation
RPA can extract predefined insights from vast datasets, empowering marketers to refine their strategies based on real-time performance metrics and customer behaviour analysis.
6. Manufacturing
In the manufacturing industry, production processes are being optimised with RPA to improve supply chain visibility and ensure quality control. Here, we have found the top processes automated to include:
- Production Planning and Scheduling:
Automation optimises production planning and scheduling by analysing production data, forecasting demand, and allocating resources efficiently, ensuring timely delivery of products and minimising production downtime. - Quality Assurance:
By automating inspection scheduling tasks, analysing product defects, and triggering corrective actions, RPA ensures adherence to quality standards and minimising rework, with minimal disruptions to production processes. - Inventory Management:
RPA facilitates inventory management processes by automating inventory tracking, material replenishment, and warehouse management tasks, optimising inventory levels, and reducing carrying costs. - Supply Chain Optimisation:
Enhanced supply chain visibility by automating supplier communications, tracking shipments, and monitoring inventory levels in real-time, has enabled manufacturers to identify bottlenecks and optimise supply chain performance.
7. Insurance
In the insurance sector, RPA applications have been implemented to consolidate areas such as claims processing, underwriting, policy administration, and customer service operations.
- Claims Processing:
Automating predefined rules for claims intake, validation, and adjudication processes by extracting data from claim forms, verifying policy coverage, and calculating claim settlements, has accelerated claims processing times and improved accuracy. - Policy Administration:
Process Automation can automate policy administration tasks such as data entry, policy updates, and document generation, which streamlines policy issuance, endorsements, and renewals while reducing administrative overhead and improving customer satisfaction. - Customer Onboarding and Servicing:
RPA supports customer onboarding and servicing by automating policyholder communications, processing policy changes, and handling policy inquiries, enhancing the overall customer experience and reducing response times.
8. Hospitality
The hospitality sector, being such a dynamic industry, holds multiple opportunities for Automation. RPA can automate reservation management processes, including booking confirmations, cancellations, and updates to reservation systems. managing reservations for hotels, restaurants, and other amenities is a critical task.
- Personalised Guest Interactions:
Today’s travellers expect personalised service. RPA enables automated check-ins as well as chatbots and automated responses to address common guest queries. Where more complex responses are needed, these are then escalated to a human responder, enhancing the overall guest experience. - Staff Scheduling and Task Assignment:
Automation tools help optimise staff schedules, assign tasks, manage & allocate maintenance requests and manage workloads. This ensures smoother operations and better resource utilisation. - Revenue Management:
Room rates can be managed based on real-time market data, maximising revenue.
9. Logistics
RPA has modernised Logistics in so many ways not least through its integration abilities. For instance, RPA bots can monitor inventory levels, generate replenishment orders, and update shipment statuses in real-time, all from different business tools, thereby streamlining the supply chain and enhancing overall efficiency.
- Compliance Monitoring & Execution
RPA is utilised to simplify customs documentation procedures, including document receipt, completion, and submission, as well as query escalation and notification. It ensures compliance with international trade regulations and minimises delays in cross-border shipments. - Order Processing:
Efficient and accurate order processing is crucial to customer satisfaction. By automating processing workflow, from receiving orders to updating inventory systems and generating shipping labels, RPA provides reduced handling opportunities, scalability & flexibility, and higher accuracy. - Warehouse Management
RPA bots can automate tasks such as stock receipts with order matching, inventory tracking and bin management, order processing and shipment scheduling, leading to faster turnaround times, reduced manual errors and better stock control.
10. Media & Broadcast
The media and broadcast industry are undergoing a digital revolution, driven by the proliferation of content across multiple platforms and channels. RPA plays a pivotal role in modernising content management and distribution processes.
- Content Metadata Tagging
Media companies deal with vast amounts of digital content, which needs to be tagged with metadata for efficient management and retrieval. RPA can automate the process of tagging content with relevant metadata, such as titles, descriptions, and keywords. and optimises content distribution across various platforms and channels. - Content Ingestion and Distribution:
Bots can upload content from various sources, as well as organise & manage play schedules, escalating errors or program failures thus ensuring consistency and accuracy. This can apply to social media advertising as well by scheduling Media posts, publishing articles and managing content distribution.
11. People Management
RPA has been transforming HR processes for years by automating repetitive tasks and allowing HR professionals to focus on what is important. RPA bots can automate tasks such as data entry, document verification, and compliance checks,
- Employee Onboarding:
A good onboarding process is essential for the smooth integration of a new employee. RPA can automate various aspects of the employee onboarding process, such as form filling, document verification, and provisioning of access to IT systems. - Benefits Administration:
Tasks such as enrolment processing, data entry, and eligibility verification have helped efficiencies in HR & IR processes by reducing manual errors, accelerating processing times, and ensuring compliance with regulations, - Performance Management:
RPA aids performance management by automating data collection, analysis, and reporting processes. It streamlines performance evaluations, monitors key metrics, and generates real-time reports for managers. By eliminating manual data entry and processing errors, RPA helps to ensure consistency in performance assessments.
What are the common RPA pitfalls and how can I avoid them?
Look, Robotic Process Automation is NOT Artificial Intelligence, it cannot see patterns in data or extract meaning or context from a text or image. Decision-making is possible if the need is simple, but RPA’s strength is taking the menial tasks away from your workforce. Robotic Process Automation is a good basis for AI, working best when it does not require cognitive interaction but solid data provisioning.
Also, garbage-in-garbage-out… if you do not understand your processes properly, or have undue waste built into your processes, you may not find the efficiencies you need to prove value. In fact, there are a few challenges that appear very often:
- One of the main reasons why RPA adoption stalls in the early phases, is the lack of clearly defined, repeatable processes. Not all processes are suitable for automation, particularly if the process involves complex decision-making or is prone to regular updates or changes.
- If the business has not defined and agreed on business rules, goals and objectives, it is difficult to measure and demonstrate the ROI from an RPA implementation.
- Where companies have poor governance and data security structures, it can expose them to unnecessary risks that are often blamed on the tool or the implementation.
- An over-dependency on attended automation limits the effectiveness of an RPA implementation. Particularly when triggers have to be manually actioned.
- Not including or neglecting to run maintenance and regular updates on your RPA Application can expose the company to unnecessary vulnerabilities and failures. As with any software, security and performance upgrades are constant and maintaining them is crucial.
- Most importantly, a common pitfall is ignoring the human element. While RPA aims to automate repetitive tasks, it’s essential to recognize the importance of human oversight, especially for RPA process design, exception handling, decision-making, and process improvement. This task was done by a person before!
- In virtually every process, there are steps which are actioned by a human that were not documented in a step guide. Ignoring the human element can lead to suboptimal outcomes, the risk of bot failure and missed opportunities for innovation.
- Almost all of these can easily be avoided by doing process discovery as part of the automation journey and including the process users and process owners from the start.
How can we get started?
If you are looking at this, you may have already identified “pain points” that you are trying to resolve. Start small, a pilot or a small proof of concept, and prioritise the processes or sections, you want to digitalise. Get your team onboard with this early in the process and make them (and their inputs) part of the change and enhancements.
With Low-Code / No-Code tools, identify the team who will be trained internally and get them involved early. This will significantly improve your return on investment if you can bring the development in-house.
Conclusion
In this article, I shared a few examples that demonstrate how RPA as an automation technology can drive efficiency, accuracy, cost savings and revenue growth benefits across these various and diverse sectors of industry. It has resulted in tangible benefits for organisations and their stakeholders.
Across sectors and business functions the need to transform and “stay ahead of the pack” will be a constant. As the world moves towards a greater use of technology, businesses will need to evolve if they want to remain competitive and the implementation of technology changes can be a practical starting point for business transformation processes, given the inherent challenges in adapting people and processes.
RPA has become a game-changer across industries that is helping businesses transform and driving innovation on a global scale. Early adopters were the massive corporates because implementation required significant investment. This has changed, and as RPA implementations have become more affordable and easier to implement, without needing fleets of consultants and external developers, so too has RPA’s popularity grown. Medium-sized businesses have also recognised the urgency to adapt in a rapidly changing global economy and market to maintain profitability but also remain relevant.
Written by Kurt van Aswegen.
Sources:
- Market Share Analysis: Robotic Process Automation, Worldwide, 2022 (gartner.com)
- “Automation with intelligence – Reimagining the organisation in the ‘Age of With’” by Deloitte Insights (https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/tw/Documents/strategy/tw-Automation-with-intelligence.pdf)
- “Automate this; The Business leader’s guide to robotic and intelligent automation – Service Delivery Transformation” by Deloitte
- Bank return on investment with RPA – Bank & Trust achieved 3,800% ROI with RPA.
- The word “parse” means to analyse an object specifically. It is commonly used in computer science to refer to reading program code. For example, after a program is written, whether it be in C++, Java, or any other language, the code needs to be parsed by the compiler to be compiled. Web scripts, written in scripting languages such as Perl or PHP, need to be parsed on the Web server so that they can output the correct HTML to a user’s browser. Parse Definition – What does “parse” mean? (Techterms.com)
