Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is automation software that emulates human actions interacting with digital systems and software. They can do things like understand what’s on a screen, enter keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data. They are perfect at performing repeatable, routine, rule-based tasks with higher accuracy and velocity than humans.

RPA has revolutionized the way businesses work, thanks to its many significant benefits:

• Optimized Resource Use
• Enhanced Accuracy
• Increased Efficiency
• Increased Productivity
• Faster Execution
• Scalable Throughput
• Increased Security
• Improved Analytics with Quality Data
• Improved Communication and Enhanced Customer Service

Unlike humans, robots can operate 24/7 and they don’t take any days off. Having robots take over some of the manually intensive work from your people and can cut operational costs by as much as 35-50%.

You could repurchase or refactor your legacy systems to enable automation, but it will make you wait months or years before ROI becomes positive; whereas RPA is built on top of your existing assets hence there is much less business risk. More importantly, you’ll begin seeing a good ROI in just weeks.

Robots work tirelessly, thereby they eliminate the risk of clerical errors and help you save the time that used to be spent correcting those errors. As robots follow all rules to the dot, they will produce 100 percent accurate results, which leads to improved quality of work and a better, attentive customer service. 100 percent accurate, and 100 percent consistent – no need for luck, skill, or concentration.

Robots do not replace humans, they assist them in completing the same amount of work in less time. In a RPA-enabled business, its people can stop copying and pasting information between business systems, they can devote their time to work that requires their skills instead. With low-level and back-office work duties split between humans and robots, RPA can increase your team’s capacity for completed work by up to 50%. Increased capacity can be reinvested in your people, or innovation for an efficient workforce, productive and happier people.

Robots can complete the same task about five times faster than humans. Especially in workflows with irregular volumes, RPA’s benefit becomes dramatically higher. For example, a business may receive a higher number of orders during Black Friday. RPA-enabled businesses don’t need to guess capacity, onboard temporary hires or redistribute employee capacity to handle unexpected number of tasks – their robotic workforce can scale up and down instantly to handle any volume of work.

Security clearance checks, access management during onboarding or offboarding, periodic security audits… The list keeps growing for humans; whereas RPA has security built-in; data access is well controlled, documented, logged, and reviewed as code. Since RPA processes are granular, the least privileges principle is applied to enforce fine-grained permissions, which is one of the best security practices.

Accurate and consistent processes will produce error-free and quality data, which is essential for analytics. RPA-enabled businesses gain access to metrics and patterns such as work volume, cycle times, errors, or anomalies. These metrics and patterns help businesses to identify process gaps and improvement areas, thereby they can make better decisions.