Robotics Process Automation (RPA)

Opportunities

More Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are turning to an emerging technology

practice called robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline enterprise operations
and reduce costs. With RPA, businesses can automate mundane rules-based business
processes, enabling business users to devote more time to serving customers or other
higher-value work. Others see RPA as a stopgap en route to intelligent automation (IA)
via machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which can be trained to
make judgments about future outputs. Using RPA tools, a company can configure
software, or a “robot,” to capture and interpret applications for processing a transaction,
manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.
RPA scenarios range from something as simple as generating an automatic response to
an email to deploying thousands of bots, each programmed to automate jobs in an ERP
system. (Boulton, 2018)

A centralized management platform provides organizations with the ability to

remotely model, monitor, control, schedule, and execute the deployment of RPA
software robots. It also allows auditing and analytics to happen in the same place.
Because certain requirements can be embedded in automation rules, RPA allows
organizations to achieve enhanced governance in order to better manage business
operations. In addition, high levels of security can be maintained through remote server
control of the software robots.

With RPA, you can automate a variety of tasks. This can include monitoring
customer activities for opportunities of upselling through segmented campaign targeting
and preparing data for customer subscription or warranty renewals. Automation can
also assist with campaign management data collection through web scraping and
information dissemination for both marketing and sales activities. Bots can be
programmed to monitor your client base’s policy status and identify gaps and
opportunities for discounts and bundles. This will enable you to send highly segmented
emails to maximize conversion and sales opportunities. RPA can replace reactive
troubleshooting with the proactive identification of issues associated with bulk
shipments of promotional materials. It can reduce cycle time by automating the
promotional materials packaging process for form submission to the regulatory
department, tracking the promotional material shipments status, and recording price
quotes in response to promo material print production bidding into an application.

In the imminent proliferation of data privacy regulations worldwide, RPA can also
play an important role in relieving the massive administrative burden that large
regulatory policies can present. Software robots can capture the information, interpret
data, perform action items and provide a response to the requester, regardless of where
data resides or of its formatting. This way, companies can set up a portal for data
subjects to review their stored data and update or delete their personal information.
With bots searching all database systems, providing speedy responses to incoming
requests and maintaining an audit trail of all requests, there’s no need for human
intervention.

Risks

As bots are trained to interact with Windows and browser-based applications,

they will become dependent for any change to those underlying systems. If an IT team
needs to roll out an upgrade, a critical patch, or any enhancement, it will need to
consider how the system change will affect the bots that interact with it. Unless handled
very carefully, this will potentially slow down the process of innovation. Unlike humans,
who adapt easily to small changes in the way a specific screen works or the data
contained within a dropdown menu, bot scripts may not react positively to even minor
changes to a user interface. When a bot “breaks,” it has the potential to cause
substantial data corruption because it won’t realize that the work it is doing is wrong and
won’t know that it should stop to ask questions, as a human would.

The risk of taking a broad approach of bot deployment from the start is that it can
consume a significant amount of an organization’s budget to develop the overall
governance framework — all before the organization has really determined how to
make its bot investments effective. This will limit the ability of the organization to build
momentum around its automation efforts, and potentially allow small and early failures
to put the entire program in jeopardy.

Setting realistic expectations, this is arguably one of the biggest obstacles when
it comes to implementing a new technology such as RPA. Instead of seeing RPA as the
panacea for operational problems and broken processes, organizations need to
recognize the limits of what RPA can and cannot do. Decisions regarding the
technology need to be made on an individualized and company-specific basis, as RPA’s
functionality, implementation timeline, and operational results will vary between different
companies.
 REFERENCES

Boulton, C. (2018, September 3). What is RPA? Retrieved November 28, 2018, from
https://www.cio.com/article/323451/business-process-management/what-is-rpa-robotic-
process-automation-explained

Debrusk, C. (2017, October 24). Five Robotic Process Automation Risks to Avoid.
Retrieved from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/five-robotic-process-automation-risks-
to-avoid/

Donaldson, P. (n.d.). Data Analysis – the Overlooked RPA Opportunity. Retrieved from
https://isg-one.com/articles/data-analysis-the-overlooked-rpa-opportunity

Liao, X. (2018, August 15). How RPA Is Changing The Way We Work. Retrieved from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/08/15/how-rpa-is-
changing-the-way-we-work

Ostdick, N. (2016, November 3). The Benefits and Challenges of RPA Implementation.
Retrieved from https://www.uipath.com/blog/the-benefits-and-challenges-of-rpa-
implementation