RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation; the technology distinguishes itself from traditional IT automation by its ability to capture and interpret the actions of specific processes in existing applications, it can operate on data, trigger responses, initiate new actions and communicate with other systems autonomously. Large and small companies will be able to benefit from RPA by expediting back-office and middle-office tasks in a wide range of industries, including insurance, finance, procurement, Supply Chain Management (SCM), accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Human Resource Management (HRM). The global Robotic Process Automation Market is expected to account for US$ 11.7 Bn by 2025 (Source: The Insight Partners Company). Some of the major driving factors contributing to the market growth are increased opportunities arising at the early stage within the BPO & shared services, Csst benefits offered by RPA, and rapid innovation in solutions by the vendors
RPA is appropriate for several business operations such as the back-office processes in accounting and finance, client relationship management and, order management in numerous verticals. For example, in the BFSI business, programming robots are utilized for dreary errands, like, approval of new records, filling and documenting of structures, and refreshing databases. In the movement business, RPA can be utilized to deal with charge review, traveler income bookkeeping, and ticketing. Furthermore, RPA can help IT organizations to enhance efficiencies, and spare cash and time.
Advantages of Implementation RPA in Various Industries
Some of the major benefits associated by the implementation of RPA are improved & enhanced services, reduction in manual error, reduced wage cost, improved business cost, increased scope for data collection, improved data quality, reduced workforce, increased customer satisfaction, reduced workload, compliance benefits, and others.
BFSI:
BFSI industry encapsulates insurance companies, non-banking financial companies, commercial banks, mutual funds, and other smaller financial bodies and institutes. These entities operate through a huge amount of data. RPA solutions are adopted by the BFSI industry mainly to maintain the quality of various products and services, and to become highly automated, reliable, and more efficient.
BFSI industry is implementing digitalization to many of its processes and customer offerings to rely on and maintain a large amount of transactional, back office, as well as various manual operations. The acceptance of RPA by the BFSI industry is expected to facilitate the sector to attain certain characteristics such as rule-based decisions with minimum variance, high volume work, reducing manual processes, and less possibility of error. Bank handles a high volume of documents, templates, withdrawals, deposits, and other transactional files. BFSI sector is witnessing the massive digital transformation and high adoption of cognitive technologies. The increasing regulations need for analytical insights, front & back-office operations, need to boost customer experience, RPA offers a competitive advantage to the BFSI sector. RPA has been widely adopted by several financial institutions attributing to the factors mentioned above, the BFSI sector in the RPA market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 18% from 2018 to 2025 (Source: The Insight Partners Company).
Major advantages of implementation of RPA in the BFSI sector are improving operational efficiency, strengthen compliance, streamlined fraud prevention & detection, improved analytical insights, enhanced customer experience, enable deep customer insights, lower operation cost, and others.
Manufacturing:
The Manufacturing industry is the initial adopter of RPA into its back-office processes for reducing human errors, automate the work, and therefore increase productivity. This industry includes various processes such as waste management, inventory management, and regulatory management, among others, with the help of RPA, the manufacturing companies are creating these processes faster and simpler. Some of the manufacturing processes where RPA are frequently deployed such as the generation of a bill, purchase order management, invoice processing, keeping track of vendor data, customer data, product info, and customer services among others. The most critical document in this industry is the Bill of Material (BoM), which consists of details of various components such as raw materials, part names, part numbers, and other details of the material needed by the manufacturer of the product. Any small data error may lead to a delay in shipment and a huge loss to the company.
By using RPA, the manufacturing industry can improve the accuracy of data, achieve fast production, and on-time shipment of the products. RPA software like MetaViewer provides information about the business processes from order management to inventory control. It will provide accurate, efficient, streamline the process, and help the company to optimize its relationship with the customers, distributors, and manufacturers. Pegasystems Inc., UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, Inc. are few of the major providers of RPA software for the manufacturing industry.
The Key advantages of implementation of RPA in the manufacturing sector are that it facilitates reporting & admin tasks, enhances the Bill of Materials (BOM), improved front office experience, simplifies HR operations, increases productivity in back-office operations, among others.
Transportation & Logistics:
Transportation & Logistics industry deals with the collection and management of the data related to fuel consumption, vehicle mileage, and driving hours. Usually, the companies follow the traditional method of on manual procedures for arranging shipments, monitoring variations, updating the customer about the status, which will slow down the operations and also affect the growth of the bottom line. These industries employ various customer service representatives (CSRs) and back-office staff for entering the data manually related to various processes such as collecting the freight bill payments, generation of invoices, schedule and keep track of shipments, solving the issues related to payments, and trace and tracking the data related to loads. With the implementation of RPA by the transportation and logistics industry into its systems, has helped the companies to streamline its operation and increase its business activities. RPA will reduce the time consumed via manual procedures; it eliminates errors, increases the efficiency of sharing the data virtually across the portals, desktops, and enterprise systems.
The transportation & logistics service vendors move shipments by air, ocean, road, or any combination of these transports. The function of this vertical is to carry out an efficient task of delivering the shipment to the right person at an optimal cost. The biggest challenge for this industry vertical is to offer differentiated service at a competitive price. The transportation & logistics vendors have to manage tasks such as managing contracts with suppliers, manage transportation, ensure regulatory compliances, plan and deliver, freight forward, manage fleet and manage relationships with various trading partners. By implementing RPA, logistics & transportation companies increases productivity and automates the front & back-office transactions.
The key advantages of implementation of RPA in the transportation & logistics sector are enabling real-time access to customer information, streamline order management, reduce transaction times, optimize order distribution cycle, among others.
Retail & e-Commerce:
The retail sector includes various rule-based, structured, and repetitive processes namely; a collection of information about the business patterns, inventory management and procurement processes such as to monitor inventories and generate notifications, and order processing and payments among others. To maintain all these processes, retailers adopted RPA software, which aids the cost-effectiveness and optimization of business processes. With the help of RPA, retailers can easily enhance their productivity and efficiency, accuracy, scalability and flexibility, cost savings, and compliance.
The adoption of RPA especially in the e-Commerce industry is highly advisable to meet the growing demand and need for customer-oriented retail practices such as product returning processes, workflow management, demand and supply planning, marketing and consumer behavior analysis, ERP management, logistics and supply chain management, and customer support management. RPA will manage the whole returning process along with the required changes to be done in the inventory database and customer’s billing, generating a required notification related to the unavailability of the products. It also maintains inventory levels to notify the retailers about the availability details of products and services to meet the customer demands. Some of the primary providers of RPA based services in the retail sector are UST Global, WorkFusion, Thoughtonomy Ltd, and Pegasystems Inc., among others.
Healthcare:
The healthcare industry is considered to be one of the highly regulated industries for quality control, and precision is an essential factor to be considered during production. For the healthcare sector, compliance with regulatory norms requires the hospitals to maintain electronic medical records of patients. Also, there has been a marked rise in the demands for real-time tracking of medical equipment, staff, and patients. A data capture tool can be used in such a scenario and enable traceability and transparency in the entire process.
RPA in the healthcare industry will permit the organizations to reduce the cost, possibilities of human error, and enhance the overall efficiency of the system. Through RPA the organization can monitor various processes such as the different managing data related to physicians and patients, claims administration, Medicare billing and compliance, patient self-pay administration, accounts receivable and denial recovery among others. By automating this process, healthcare providers remain ensured of the information available for patient care as well as patient accounting. This results in increased quality of data, enhanced patient care, business efficiency, and cost savings for the healthcare organization.
