The digitalisation era has opened up many opportunities to improve employee efficiency in ways that were not available in the recent past.
As organisations look for ways to better utilise their talent, one way to support this effort is to ensure that employees remain focussed on high-value activities and finding ways to reduce or eliminate mundane or low-value tasks.
Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a fairly recent development which uses software to emulate human activity – in particular, the type of activity or tasks associated with business processes. An example of this might include all the tasks associated with creating a monthly report. In this scenario, one or more employees would typically download data from one or more systems. The data would have to be checked, possibly configured in a particular way, charts created and finally published. The total effort involved in this activity on a monthly basis could be considerable. Using RPA, the human effort required reduces to zero.
RPA is best suited to tasks which are high-volume, low- complexity and routine.
Implementation costs are relatively low and offer excellent payback ROI
How it works
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a program which simulates human activity by enabling routine and repetitive process-related tasks to be automated.
Tasks can include such things as gathering data, checking the quality of the data, combining it with data from a variety of sources and publishing the data to a report.
RPA uses software robots or ‘bots’ to complete these tasks. ‘Bot’s are usually based on a recording of tasks which emulate the actions of a human.
Automated tasks will include a combination of commands and the necessary logic to deal with different scenarios, including any errors which may arise during execution.
RPA is capable of interacting with multiple systems and application.