Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as a game-changing technology that
empowers organizations to achieve processes optimization and operational costs reduction.
RPA also enables businesses to free up valuable human resources and focus on strategic,
high-value activities by automating mundane and repetitive tasks. RPA involves the use of
software robots or “bots” to mimic human actions and interactions within digital systems.
What is RPA?
RPA is a technology that uses software robots (or bots) to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks
in business processes. These bots are designed to mimic the actions of a human user
interacting with computer systems and applications. RPA is typically used for tasks that are rule-
driven, high-volume, off hours processing and require little to no human decision-making.
Advantages of RPA
Case Study
RPA can automate a wide range of tasks and processes across various industries. There are
different use cases that can be automated using RPA and are beneficial for a wide range of
businesses. Here is a case study that showcases the benefits of using RPA.
Problem Statement
A car dealer company receives many orders by email in a day. These orders are manually
processed by their team. The order details are added to CRM to complete the registration
process. The confirmation email is sent to customers with the details as PDF attachment.
Company has 15 dealers across different geographical areas. Each dealer has a different
format and language used for the PDF. This manual process takes 15-20 mins per order.
Solution
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) allows the RPA bots to recognize and convert
printed or handwritten text within images or scanned documents into machine-readable text.
With RPA bots, the emails were automatically read to extract the order data.
RPA then further does data validation, adjustments and processing to integrate and
update the CRM systems to register the order. After the registration process is completed, RPA
generates the acknowledgement PDF with the dealer specific templates and language
preference. Then the PDF is sent as an attachment to the customer by automated email and
also uploaded to the company database.
With RPA in place, the company is now capable of processing orders within 5 mins of
receiving the email. RPA bots can also be scheduled on demand and after hours based on
business requirements. With automation, processing time for each order came down to less
than 3 mins saving a lot of labor cost. Now the company can process 10 times more orders on
a daily basis with increased accuracy.
Any unprocessed emails or orders are queued to avoid data loss. This provides an
added advantage in case of RPA bot outages. Team gets periodic notifications or alerts on
RPA execution status. RPA bot are deployed on multiple servers as a fail-over measure.
RPA feature highlights
● Read emails
● File data extraction using OCR
● Data processing
● Integrate with CRM
● Fill in dealer specific templates
● Send emails with attachments
● Upload documents
RPA bots can also be used for web automation to login and auto fill & submit forms for
multiple users. Many common business use-cases like customer & employee onboarding, CRM,
inventory management, invoice & expense processing, manage helpdesk, HR & payroll, quality
assurance testing etc… can greatly enhance the way they are functioning today.
RPA is very useful for tasks involving multiple systems and data sources, as it can
integrate with different software and automate complex processes. Some of specialized use
cases are also available on https://apprely.com/rpa/
Choosing a right RPA solution depending on business specific needs is crucial.
Implementation of RPA does need careful planning, governance, consideration of data security
and regulatory compliances. Once all aspects fall in place, RPA can unlock the efficiency to a
great extent serving many short and long term returns.
Have a happy time and let the automation do the work for you!
Sayali Mokate & Namrata Jawalkar
AppRely Technologies
https://www.austintechnologycouncil.org/company/apprely-technologies/