Industries the world over are transforming to meet the needs of future generations. The population is expanding, which means processes must be refined, enhanced, and optimized. Automation technology, specifically Robotic Process Automation (RPA), is at the core of these changes, allowing businesses to use software-driven robots to automate routine activities. As a result, human labor is minimized so that employees can focus their efforts on more impactful work.
Hannover Messe is shining a spotlight on the entire automation technology spectrum, offering companies a global platform to share and discuss innovations within the sector. BCC Research is thrilled to be attending 2023’s event, in a bid to witness first-hand burgeoning developments. With the event almost in full swing, we’re diving into some of the key use cases of RPA, investigating how these applications might change the future of enterprise for good. Our report Global Robotic Process Automation Market: Trends and Forecast (2022-2027) breaks down the biggest trends and takeaways in the current and future market.
Reporting and administration
Reporting allows organizations to gain insights into their finances, personnel, and customers. RPA bots can help automate reporting procedures through:
- Acquiring information from many business resources.
- Compiling and delivering reports depending on the data obtained.
- Updating data in other systems, depending on reports (for example, CRM).
These reports can help teams make better decisions based on data-driven projections. Data from company resources are gathered, meaningfully organized, and delivered to decision-makers or clients through reporting. The fact that these repetitive operations are GUI-based and simple for a bot to accomplish makes RPA an excellent choice for automating them. RPA bots, for instance, can:
- Generate reports: Bots may combine columns, rows, or tables, perform operations like Excel’s PivotTable, leverage API functions, generate reports, and store them in specified business documents (such as Excel tables, sheets and datasets).
- Collect business data: RPA bots can log into corporate email accounts or accounts, scan files and attachments, and find and gather information pertinent to the task.
- Update business datasets: Bots can be programmed to identify variables present in reports and can update these parameters at a specific time or when an event is triggered. These include:
- Finance data: invoices, accounts payable, accounts receivable.
- Employee data: employees’ personal and business information, onboarding and offboarding documents, PTOs.
- Logistics data: shipments, tracking, delivery.
- CRM data: customer ID information, purchases, service tickets, etc.
- Send reports: The bot may be designed to deliver business reports to a particular individual or group when they have been created and saved (e.g., department, manager, employee, customer). This is a challenging undertaking, particularly for businesses whose contact information is continuously changing due to the addition of new customers and employees. Reports can be sent by bots using email, WhatsApp, Slack messaging, etc.
Customer support
Software automation has significantly changed the way that customer support is provided, as evidenced by chatbots, voice assistants and automated contact centers.
The emphasis on front- and back-end user experience has diminished as automated customer support has become commonplace and as contact centers employ a variety of apps to determine and address customer needs.
An employee helping a client with an issue or need, for instance, will probably have to switch between several channels and platforms, which will take their attention away from the consumer and eventually reduce productivity. The post-engagement wrap-up is the same. This engagement’s manual activities can be handled by RPA, freeing the employee to focus solely on the needs of the client.
Data migration
The task of data migration often is needed when a business merges, acquires, implements, innovates, retires a legacy system, upgrades its ERP system or moves to the cloud. As data migration often includes legacy systems without API access, employing RPA for data migrations is a low-risk option since it avoids affecting underlying systems and databases. This is because RPA integrates at the user interface (UI) level.
Benefits of Using RPA for Data Migration
- Acceleration of data migration: Robots can be deployed in large numbers to migrate and validate data continually.
- Lowered cost of migration: Because RPA doesn’t require coding or a particular user interface, utilizing it for data migrations can reduce the cost of the conversion itself.
- Minimized errors: RPA decreases human intervention and, consequently, human error by automating many of the time-consuming validation stages.
- Integration of data from multiple systems: RPA and data transfer can assist in bringing legacy data into compliance.
- Added flexibility and scalability: Robots can handle multiple data formats and generate log files as necessary for a given circumstance.
Analysis
The automation process starts with RPA analysis. RPA analysis involves evaluating an organization’s capacity for automation. It begins with a review of all processes and their potential for automation and concludes with the choice of the process and preparation for the subsequent RPA Proof of Concept (PoC) phase.
Many RPA early adopters are concerned primarily with short-term cost savings and neglect to leverage the technology’s capacity to provide business improvement.
An RPA solution quickly generates metrics and data after implementation, giving crucial insights into operational performance. RPA accomplishes what a typical six sigma program would effectively take months of data collecting, analysis and reporting to accomplish. In other words, performance analysis and measurement are integral components of robots.
Let’s kickstart the conversation at Hannover Messe
The BCC Research team is incredibly excited to witness all Hannover Messe has to offer. If you’d like to book a meeting with us now to discuss insights and opportunities across robotics, AI, and industry, then get in touch with us here.
