Robotic Process Automation (RPA): 8 Key Benefits

What is RPA and how can it help your business?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of automation that uses bots to perform high-volume, repetitive tasks that don’t require analytical skills or cognitive reasoning. What can these RPA bots do? They can handle functions like typing and making keystrokes, clicking, opening browser windows, logging into systems, copying and pasting, and recognizing icons and images. 

Companies use RPA to alleviate the burden of time-consuming processes from their employees. Typically, these processes involve monotonous work or repetitive tasks that employees don’t enjoy. Using software bots like RPA has benefits for employees, such as freeing them to focus on higher-value cognitive work and reduces errors.

In addition to that benefit, RPA can help businesses improve process efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce expenses. According to a Deloitte survey, companies that adopted RPA practices reported ROI payback in less than 12 months.

When RPA is built into workflows as part of a broader automation strategy that includes other automation capabilities, such as AI- and machine learning-powered intelligent document processing (IDP), business rules, or smart services, it becomes an even more powerful tool for process improvement. 

What business functions benefit from RPA?

The benefits of automation via RPA aren’t limited to just one industry or department, either. Here are just a few examples: 

• Procurement: Inventory reconciliation through RPA can help multinational companies achieve more than 70% reduction in reconciliation cycle time. (Supply Chain Brain)

• Accounting: The average amount of avoidable rework in accounting departments can take up to 30% of a full-time employee’s overall time. (Gartner)

• IT: A 2020 Gartner report on IT cost optimization found that the introduction or augmentation of automation can help organizations achieve 10%–15% net savings in ongoing IT services project costs. (Supply Chain Brain)

• Sales: An estimated 80% of the purchase order process can be automated. (Supply Chain Brain)

What are the business benefits of RPA? 8 ways to gain. 

RPA is a key capability in your digital transformation initiatives, allowing you to: 

• Automate manual and repetitive tasks easily and quickly. 

• Connect with legacy systems that don’t have an application programming interface (API).

• Improve efficiency, reduce costs, optimize processes, and enhance workflows. 

• Reduce errors and risk. 

Let’s examine eight business benefits of RPA in more detail:

1. Speed: Manual processes that take humans hours of work take bots just a few minutes. Deloitte Robotics, for example, used RPA to automate over 100 tasks, reducing manual work by 96% and saving 41,000 manual work hours in one year. 
2. Productivity: Unlike humans, bots can work non-stop. When the workflow needs the bot to execute the program, it can just run. And it’s not just robots being productive: when you have RPA taking care of routine tasks, your employees can attend to more critical, analytical, or cognitive work. 
3. Accuracy: Mundane tasks often invite error when humans complete them, which isn’t the case with bots. Bots follow basic decision rules (if X input is received, then Y output follows) that govern their work. RPA reduces the incidence of human error. 
4. Improved employee satisfaction: RPA benefits employees. When employees are freed of the rote, repetitive, and mundane tasks that RPA takes on, they're able to tackle more interesting and innovative work. This results in improved employee engagement and higher satisfaction levels.
   [ Want to see more ways you could apply RPA? Download our eBook: 200 use case ideas for RPA and intelligent document processing (IDP). ]
5. Customer satisfaction: Giving bots and employees the right work leads to better outcomes for customers. A bot can accomplish basic tasks, like posting a bill to an account or sending a confirmation email immediately to customers, while employees gain time back to focus on higher-value work, like providing quality customer service. This combination of quick answers when needed and one-on-one attention for more involved inquiries drives successful customer experience. 
6. New life for legacy systems: When your business adds new technology, it’s not always possible to update legacy systems so that everything integrates. RPA shines in these instances. Since bots can login to systems, access information, and input that data into other systems, it makes them the perfect fit for connecting software where no APIs exist. This gives business users the connected experience and functionality they need, without the delays of API development. 
7. Compliance and managed risk: You can use RPA to spot instances of noncompliance or transactions occurring outside of set risk thresholds. Additionally, because RPA limits the incidence of error, you can rely more confidently on its outputs than you could those of humans.
8. Reduced costs: At this point, it's easy to see all the ways RPA can cut costs. Increasing the speed and accuracy of your processes will positively impact your bottom line. Employees who are happier and more engaged with their work are more likely to remain in their jobs. Happier customers are more loyal customers who will keep coming back. RPA can help you avoid fines on being out of compliance. And finally, RPA can help with connections to legacy systems.

“The digital transformation of companies has a clear ally in the automation of processes with RPA. The need to automate, digitize, and achieve operational efficiencies involves the implementation of software robots that accelerate and ensure the quality of processes and free people to attend to more strategic and higher valued tasks.”
–Miguel Ángel Barrio, Head of Entelgy Digital

[ How else could RPA benefit your organization? Read our related article: 6 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Real-World Examples. ]

RPA vs. BPA.

People often get RPA and BPA confused. While RPA describes just one tool (bots automating simple tasks), business process automation (BPA) actually describes the entire body of automation tools and methods that you might use in your automation journey. You might also come across the term “digital process automation”—this is just another way to refer to BPA. 

RPA is a type of automation that falls under BPA, rather than a replacement or a competitor to it. RPA is also just one type of automation out of many. Think of BPA as the umbrella over your complete automation capabilities. RPA stands under that umbrella  alongside AI-powered IDP, smart services, and business rules. These are all pieces of a complete automation suite, and they work best to improve your business processes when you use them in tandem. 

Advantages and disadvantages of RPA: What can it be used for?

You’ve seen many of the advantages of RPA already, including speed, refocused time as a benefit of RPA for employees, and reduced error. But RPA does have a few disadvantages, and the first is important: it’s not designed to be the only tool in your automation lifecycle. When companies treat RPA as a catch-all for every automation need, it breaks down.

RPA performs well in situations that meet the criteria below, but when you move outside of these criteria, RPA won’t be a good fit. So, what can RPA be used for?

• Tasks with few variations or exceptions. If conditions are likely to vary or evolve rapidly, rather than happening in the same way every time, RPA will struggle to conduct the process. Repeatable and consistent tasks are best for this type of bot. 

• High-volume tasks. You’ll get most value from building a bot to work on a high-volume task. You could justify using RPA for a low-volume task that needs a high level of accuracy, but if the task doesn’t take the human worker very long anyway, it might not be worth building a bot for. 

• Rules-based tasks. Bots need structure to guide the decisions they’ll execute. Focus on implementing RPA for tasks that follow a logical flow: if X, then Y. If that logic won’t work for your task, RPA isn’t a good fit.  

• Tasks existing in well-defined processes, systems, and workflows. RPA needs stable tasks, and similarly, RPA needs a stable environment. Too many changes to the surrounding system will burden the development team with making changes to the bot, limiting its time-saving value. 

• Tasks with structured data and readable inputs. RPA has to work with structured data, because unusual formats or data-like images, rich text, or rich media can confuse a bot.

Rather than stretching RPA outside of these boundaries, choose from an array of other automation tools, like business rules, IDP, and low-code automation to work in partnership with RPA. 

One other consideration for RPA: If you build RPA within a traditional development environment, updates to an application can make a bot useless. With an eye for long-term maintenance, consider a low-code platform with built-in automation capabilities to improve sustainability and resilience.

[ Which emerging automation trends deserve your attention now? Get the Gartner Hyperautomation 2022 Trends Report. ]