RPA: The Future of Automation.

By: Lokesh & Ananthu

Imagine, you have launched your start-up and you require manpower for the various tasks such as collecting client details, the payment process, etc but you have used the maximum of your investment and are left with an amount that’s not sufficient to get people required for various tasks. You would have to face great difficulties if you can’t find the workforce soon for those jobs. 
Now, replace this scenario of a start-up with that of Healthcare, Educational, Banking sectors which require people for collecting data of their patients, students, clients and also to perform other administrative tasks with greater efficiency. So, how can we increase productivity and achieve our desired results with fewer errors?
Robotic Process Automation, also known as RPA is a technology that mimics humans’ interaction with software and aims at automating business processes. Using RPA, a company can configure a bot that can perform various administrative tasks. RPA along with other technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can be used to configure bots to perform more complicated jobs. RPA can understand and react to changing scenarios, circumstances, and exceptions, unlike previous automation methods. RPA software can use data, trigger responses, create new actions, and connect with other systems independently once it has been designed to capture and understand the workflow of certain operations in the software application. Isn’t it fascinating? But what are the pros of using RPA over the human workforce? Some of the benefits are a reduction in human errors, an increase in accuracy, the time is taken to perform repetitive tasks by humans is reduced, an increase in capability to handle large data, it is less expensive, and many more.
To understand the importance of RPA better let us take real-life scenarios. One of the most important sectors amid Covid is the medical sector. Healthcare providers are increasingly burdened with administrative chores that divert attention away from their primary goal – patient care. Continuous digitization of patient records, data compliance, budgetary pressures, and a shortage of IT resources are all challenges. Healthcare organizations can gain substantial operational efficiency by implementing RPA, allowing clinical staff to focus on judgment-based choices rather than administrative activities. 
A bank’s experience with RPA, according to David Schatsky, a managing director at Deloitte LLP, was that the bank redesigned its claims process by deploying 85 bots to conduct 13 procedures, processing 1.5 million requests per year. According to Schatsky, the bank expanded capacity comparable to more than 200 full-time employees for around a third of the cost of hiring more people. 
Shane Jason Mock, Vice President of research and development for American Fidelity Assurance was doubtful when he heard about employing bots to automate data entry. Well, a demonstration of RPA transporting data from a spreadsheet to a mainframe convinced him otherwise. Mock’s company that handles 2.5 million health insurance policies selected RPA from UiPath. American Fidelity also uses the RPA in its accounting, claims processing, and other business divisions. RPA and machine learning combined were also used by Mock to classify and route emails related to claims and other business activities. Previously, humans read each email and forwarded it to the appropriate recipient. Mock claims that scanning 9,000 emails, which used to take 45 hours, now takes 3 seconds. 
Every coin has two sides and RPA has its pitfalls too. RPA, despite all its numerous benefits, comes with its own set of concerns for any organization when using them. One of them is the difficulty in integrating it with the current workforce and replacing the same. Employing RPA induces the feeling of insecurity among the workers in an organization as they fear losing their jobs to robots which is already a growing concern in the job sector with the rise of various new technologies. Moreover, most employees find it difficult to adapt and learn to work alongside these new robots which have replaced their co-workers. Moreover, there is a fear that either malicious activities like hacking or usual malfunctions like a system crash could lead to losing confidential information. Another concern regarding the use of bots is that there is no guarantee that a bot can be as responsive, cordial, or intuitive as a human employee. There is a great deal of proactive planning to be taken before the implementation of an RPA.
The question that comes to mind now that we’ve gone in-depth about RPA and how beneficial it can be to an organization-” What are the tools that we can use to implement RPA in organizations?”. Fortunately for us, there exists a variety of tools and services in the market that can help in the implementation of RPA. Automation Anywhere is one such service provider. It is one of the leading and trusted service providers for efficient RPA tools. The architecture of Automation Anywhere is client/server-based. Bot insights, which is an analytics engine that allows users to visualize user data and take business insights from it. It includes attractive features like bot insights, which is an analytics engine that allows users to visualize user data and take business insights from it, a bot farm which allows companies to buy RPA tools on a usage basis rather than on a capacity or license basis, and a bot store which is a marketplace where ready to use bots are available
In conclusion, from what we’ve seen so far about RPA and how incredibly beneficial it can be to different organizations as an efficient solution for repetitive tasks that will be completed more quickly and effectively, allowing humans to concentrate on more human-centric skills like reasoning, judgment, and emotional intelligence, we eagerly look forward to watching more companies adopt this process and streamline their manufacturing as much as possible. RPA has a promising future for various applications in different industries and will soon be adopted by various companies to come.