Common Business Processes and Activities

In our previous articles, we shared the definition of RPA as well as the benefits of RPA for your daily workload. Here are some insightful examples of organizations who are utilizing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in their daily business processes.

Activities in Operation Functions

The common use case of RPA in today’s organisation is mainly to assist humans to reduce the rate of errors from highly repetitive work. We often get customer complaints due to human errors (manual work). The sales department, for example, is involved with daily sales activities ranging from closing deals to sending invoices and collecting payments from the customers. With RPA in action, you can provide faster service to your customers. Since automation can speed up processes, customers will receive invoices earlier, leading to earlier payments and improved cash flow. Furthermore, RPA robots can exchange data between different systems. This can significantly improve the efficiency of processing new orders. With the help of RPA, the instructions (email or order forms) given by the customer (through structured workflow setup) enable the bots to extract data from the instructions then mimic human workflow to get the job done.

Besides the sales department, RPA also gives great assistance to the finance and procurement department. RPA bots fill the integration gaps by providing easy integration methods. Same as the bots in sales, RPA bots for the procurement department can extract data and validate from the incoming information received. Another process and activity that have been widely practised is the automation in CRM systems. Legacy systems perform a critical function at companies. However, legacy systems frequently require significant amounts of manual work from the workforce due to the fact that they are unable to integrate with most of the latest systems. Additionally, this can also lead to a high potential of administration errors. With RPA in place, we can now integrate an application for more holistic analyses.

On the other hand, RPA technology can set up bots to automatically update relevant data by providing the department with more up-to-date and accurate data. This method is highly applicable to a department that has a constant change of data such as the HR, Sales, and Marketing departments. The data change includes job title, email, and addresses of customers.

Next, RPA bots are also able to assist departments to generate a report and segregate to relevant parties. All you need to make this happen is by creating the inputs and the desire information for the report to be generated. RPA will take care of the rest and start to make sure everyone gets their report on time as usual.

Activities in Support Functions

Time-consuming and repetitive tasks is a significant reason that a workforce might lose passion for their daily work. Besides simple tasks in commercial functions. RPA robots can help overcome this problem by automating complex system administration tasks around IT applications and infrastructure, including tasks such as:

1. Regular diagnostics for preventive maintenance. Over the years, preventive maintenance has been proven to be able to save significant amounts of money for the organisation as well as to cut losses to a minimum when incidents occur. IT helpdesk department frequently receive incident about similar issues. Therefore, regular diagnostic scans by bots are able to support these teams to foresee upcoming errors before they impact the user directly. The main benefit of having bots to run the diagnostics, while the rest of the technician attends to more serious tickets, is that it provides the team with the opportunity to plan their work more effectively. (more issues solved in a day).
2. Technology. RPA provides customers with the possibility to access advanced functions. Since most RPA systems are user-friendly and easy to set up, most business users can learn to utilize RPA technologies without any formal training. The IT team will be identifying the popular functionalities of an internal tool to grant access than with the help of bots the selected functionalities can be completed and given access to users directly. This saves users time while reducing the burden of support teams.
3. Automated Testing for software. In RPA tools functionality is embedded for automated software testing. Such tests are usually very time consuming when performed manually. However, RPA can speed up when they are automated. Common test scenarios are automated with RPA tools and these tests can be set to run after every version, ensuring that new bugs do not exist in the code. You would require more dynamic manual tests based on the specific feature developed in each new version. However, automated testing with RPA tools can facilitate testing and improve software quality. No coding RPA solutions would be ideal for such a simple test scenario.