Robotic Process Automation – the fastest growing form of software in the world
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the fastest growing form of software in the world – Are you already aware of its potential?
Is manual labor in computing still going strong in 2020s?
It shouldn’t be, and still it is.
This is almost always due to the legacy of separate and incompatible information systems inherited from previous years and decades, between which information has to be transferred manually. For example, manual data transfer between invoicing materials, invoicing and accounting, or between different ERP systems and financial management, is unfortunately still commonplace in many companies and communities.
RPA helps you to get rid of manual labor
The word robot can evoke a wide variety of images, but in the realm of software, images are mostly positively.
Namely, RPA offers the easiest, fastest and most cost-effective solution to get rid of the inefficiency of manual work. Robots make it possible to create automatic connections between different data sources and systems without time-consuming coding.
Legacy systems that can’t be abandoned for various reasons and modern systems seldom work smoothly together. Building integrations is often difficult or even impossible – or at least expensive. With Robotics these connections can be build easily, quickly and cost-effectively.
The use of software robots and the reduction of manual work do not in any way result in a person becoming redundant: the best consequence of this is that the functions become more meaningful. People can focus on the tasks that are most relevant to their work, the company’s internal processes can be significantly streamlined, and all of this is accomplished without coded integrations or system investments.
Cognitive Document Automation (CDA) makes the use of robots almost limitless
When robotics is further enhanced with a CDA tool, it is not necessary to set a predefined format for the data sources, but the data source can be anything. Doesn’t that sound like a dream come true from the perspective of many companies’ operations? Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.
Customer service: Retrieving customer information and submitting action requests to various systems is a one-stop shop. With the help of CDA, requests for action can also be identified and forwarded via e-mail, which gives customer service considerably more opportunities to improve the service experience.
Invoicing: Big companies receive a lot of invoices. Those need to be checked for accuracy by various systems and must also be approved by the parties concerned. With the help of robotics, these processes can be made much more efficient compared to manual processing. And an invoice doesn’t have to have a specific format: CDA can reliably identify and classify data from a variety of sources — e-invoices, scanned paper invoices, pdfs, emails, and so on.
Minimizing manual labor = increasing efficiency and meaningfulness
Finally, let’s review the major benefits of software robotics and CDA:
- Get rid of manual labor: employees can focus on the essentials and work becomes more meaningful in many ways
- Improving business operations: In addition to streamlining many back office functions, the level of customer service can be improved when data is routinely available whenever it is needed
- Cost-effectiveness: each euro invested in robotics typically pays for itself in a relatively fast time
Overall, software robotics is a dazzlingly powerful tool for process automation, data aggregation, and business efficiency. As part of a broader intelligent automation (IA) package, it is an important building block in the digitalization of a company’s business. In a word: robots have intelligence.