10 Must Know Benefits of RPA

Grand View Research expects that the global robotic process automation (RPA) industry is projected to grow at a CAGR of 39.9% between 2023 to 20230, forecasted to reach $30,850 million by 2030. Businesses all over the world are well aware of the benefits of RPA, which is helping them to reap greater productivity, generate increased revenue, and optimise outcomes.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the RPA benefits for employees and employers, review the limitations of RPA, and see how certain kinds of automation software can perfectly complement RPA to get the most benefits from it.

Coming Up

What is RPA?

How Does RPA Help Business?

What are the Benefits of RPA?

What are the Challenges of RPA?

How is RPA Used?

Closing Thoughts

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation is a software that uses robots to mimic human actions. With robotic process automation, you can build workflows and allow the robots to execute your repetitive and data-heavy tasks.

As robotic process automation tools standardies tasks, businesses benefit from more time and greater productivity levels. The software bot is able to manage processes that manipulate data and rely on triggered responses.

How Does RPA Help Business?

RPA has proven to be a game changer for all the businesses that implement and use it properly. Robotic process automation removes mundane tasks for a human’s to-do list.

With the benefits of RPA, businesses are able to:

• Focus on core business operations
• Reduce manual errors
• Maximise employee satisfaction
• Save money and time
• Encourage employees to focus on high-level tasks

What are the Benefits of RPA?

The benefits of RPA are extensive! Here’s a look at what you stand to gain when you implement RPA within your business:

1. Save Costs

Think about the amount of processes that run on a daily basis to keep your business thriving. Chances are, there are a lot of them! Each process that runs requires human involvement and time. This equates to costs.

Along with the cost of human resources comes the opportunity cost of staff allocating their hours to time-consuming tasks. RPA streamlines processes and automates repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up your team’s time to focus on high value tasks that make a difference.

2. Decrease Compliance Risks

Since data-heavy and manual tasks are filled with the chance of mistakes, RPA can be used to decrease your compliance risks. When you know that your activities are being managed securely and with accuracy, you have less to worry about.

3. Boost Productivity

Since RPA isn’t intended to replace humans, it’s used to maximise their productivity. When you implement RPA, your team’s productivity is maximised because the more important tasks get tackled by them, whereas the workflows that can be automated get done.

4. Enhance Efficiency

No matter how efficient humans are, time is always a constraint. However, robotic process automation doesn’t have a shutoff time, so you can technically have it running day and night to keep processes moving in the right direction.

5. Increase Customer Service

With RPA by your side, you can handle answering more customer support tickets and improve operations. As a result, your customer service capabilities increase, and customer satisfaction goes up. When customers are happier, they are more likely to remain loyal and purchase more, thereby increasing your bottom line!

6. Gain Analytics

One of the greatest benefits of robotic process automation is gaining access to accurate and timely analytics. RPA can help to gather your data and organize it as you deem necessary. This way, you can make more informed business-decisions and even use the analytics to conduct process improvement.

7. Expand Scalability

As we’ve touched on several times, RPA maximises your organisation’s productivity levels. Not only does this increase efficiency, but it can also help you to scale your operations and practices. With business growth comes increased responsibilities and tasks.

Having RPA means that you can automate many of the tasks without having to hire a bigger workforce or overburden your existing team.

8. Improve Security

Robotic process automation is designed to execute specific tasks. As such, it comes along with its own level of security. Access to data is totally controlled and documented. Additionally, when you choose to deploy automation software for finance functions, you also reap the benefits of top-tier security and automatic updates.

9. Easy to Deploy

Another great advantage of RPA is that it’s easy to implement! Once you train the bot or structure its workflow once, you can repeat interminably. There are RPA options with and without human intervention, so you can choose the tool that’s right for your business’ needs and workforce.

10. Streamlined Capabilities

With RPA, your processes don’t run the risk of running into delays or bottlenecks because the system is set up with triggers and standardised procedures.

Rather than having to manually update or initiate the next step of a process, the software will do it for you. This means that you no longer have to worry about missing deadlines.

What are the Challenges of RPA?

While there aren’t that many disadvantages of RPA, there are some challenges that can come along with its implementation and use. As with any technology, it’s important to have proper training and understanding of its use cases before deploying within your organisation.

Some hurdles may include:

1. Increased Complexity

Once you implement RPA to automate a process, it may complicate pinpointing the source of any issues. That’s why it’s best to improve your processes before you automate them completely.

2. Change Management

Make sure that your team knows that RPA is not intended to replace jobs! It simply augments human’s capabilities and will give them more time to focus on strategic and creative tasks, rather than manual and tedious ones.

3. Constraints

There are some processes that RPA can’t handle. Since it’s intended to perform repetitive and data-heavy tasks, it has its own share of limitations. That’s why you can use automation software to complement RPA.

While RPA is an incredible solution for data heavy and repetitive tasks, there’s more you’ll wish to streamline once you begin using technology. Automation software is an amazing complement to RPA.

Automation software can perform transaction matching and reconciliations, analyse expenses, calculate rebates and expenses, and prepare reports and forecasts.

So, you can leverage RPA to extract your data from otherwise hard-to-reach systems, and then you can utilize automation software to make use of that data for analysis, reporting, and forecasting needs.

How is RPA Used?

Robotic process automation can be applied to several different departments and tasks across all industries. To get an idea of how RPA is used, consider the following examples:

1. Information Technology

IT departments can use RPA to increase compliance and help to decrease security risks. IT departments are constantly flooded by tickets and questions. RPA can be implemented to respond to support tickets, send out reminders for security updates, and ensure infrastructure is properly set up.

2. Finance

Finance teams place primary importance on data, recordkeeping, and accuracy. RPA can be used for data management tasks and performing simple calculations, claims processing, and accounts payable, for example.

Automation software, on the other hand, can actually execute complex processes, wrangle and transform data, interact with legacy systems, conduct regulatory reporting, calculate commissions, and more.

Think of it like this: RPA is the machine that grinds your coffee beans, and automation software is the machine that turns those ground coffee beans into your liquid cup of coffee.

To exemplify, you use the ingredients (data) that RPA helps you access and then automation software applies it to give you the usable result (insights and analytics). While you can have one without the other, you’re not going to actually be able to get everything you need without the combination of both.

3. Sales

When it comes to sales teams, robotic process automation can help to acquire new leads, increase collaboration between teams and automate outreach to clients.

4. Operations

RPA is great for operational processes, such as fulfilling requests, managing orders and fulfillment, and tracking payment processing.

Closing Thoughts

As you can tell, the benefits of RPA greatly outweigh any of its disadvantages. That being said, robotic process automation does have its own share of limitations. Due to the limitations of RPA and its inability to automate complex processes, businesses often leverage automation software in tandem with RPA tools.

Finance automation software can help to manage the more complex and data-driven processes, functions, and analytics that benefit a business’ decision-making and ability to gain insights. Be sure to check out more on what finance automation software is here.