Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA is the use of software to automate business processes such as interpreting applications, processing transactions, dealing with data, and even replying to emails. RPA automates repetitive tasks that people used to do. 

RPA can be used to automate repetitive tasks both in the back office and front office that require human intervention. Some common RPA examples are automation of data entry, data extraction and invoice processing. 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) applications

1- Data updates

Most departments including HR, customer service and marketing routinely need to update customer/personnel data which is constantly changing. Setting up bots for auto updating relevant data from forms or email can ensure that departments can access fresh and correct data.

2- Data validation

Most data validation controls can be embedded in databases. However, there’s data validation tasks such as cross checking data against publicly available data, for which RPA automation is more suitable than other tools.

3- Extracting data from PDFs, scanned documents and other formats

Screen scraping, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and basic pattern recognition technologies enable data extraction from almost any format, reducing the need for keying in data. Feel free to review a data driven list of machine learning powered solutions. These can be easily integrated to RPA solutions to extract data and process documents.

4- Periodic report preparation and dissemination

Every business requires regular reports to inform managers and ensure teams are aware of their progress. Preparing such reports and sending them over every week or month is not labor intensive but it distracts employees.  RPA can help to automate periodic reporting. RPA solutions can easily auto-generate reports, analyze their contents and based on the contents, email them to relevant stakeholders.

For example, a telecom operator report showing areas with connectivity issues has different recipients based on its severity. CTO should be copied in reports with critical issues and head of network should be copied in reports with major issues. RPA bots can analyze reports to modify recipients according to provided criteria.

5- Data migration and entry

Legacy systems still perform critical functions at companies. For example, legacy billing systems need to interface with other systems and such systems may not have the capability to pull relevant data from APIs. In such cases, employees manually migrate data using formats like CSV. RPA can prevent such manual labor and potential clerical errors it brings.

Furthermore such systems that keep data up to date enable improved analysis and decision making. We are living in a day when even marketing has 5000 applications to choose from. RPA can help integrate applications and allow for more holistic analyses.

6- Generating mass emails

Mass emails relying on data from multiple systems are painful to produce manually. Especially if you are sending them frequently, consider automating the process.

7- Creating and delivering invoices

This is a case of data replication. Same sales data needs to exist in both CRM and accounting systems. Instead of manual data replication, bots can update accounting records, prepare and deliver invoices from the right email accounts.

8- Updating CRM

Updating interactions to CRM is time consuming and unproductive yet necessary. Because Salesforce acts needs to act as the source of truth regarding customer interactions. There is an emerging class of solutions that allow companies to integrate their email, call and other communication data to CRM. If you can not find a good solution for the CRM system you are using, you could write a simple bot to update your CRM records with customer contact data.