While existing capabilities of screen-scraping and macros software technology may come to mind, RPA is an evolution beyond these solutions. RPA is becoming an important automation tool driving digital transformation and the future of work.

What are the benefits of RPA?

As a user-friendly and cost-effective tool, robotic process automation provides a number of advantages that are drawing interest from organizations across many industries. The business benefits of RPA include:

• Low technical barriers: Programming skills are not necessary to configure a software robot. As a primarily code-free technology, any non-technical staff can use a drag and drop process designer to set up a bot—or even record their own steps to automate a process through a process recorder feature.
• Increased accuracy: Bots are extremely accurate and consistent – they are much less prone to making mistakes or typos than a human worker.
• Meet regulatory compliance standards: Bots only follow the instructions they have been configured to follow and provide an audit trail history for each step. Furthermore, if steps in a particular process need to be reviewed, bots can also play back their past actions. The controlled nature of bot work makes them suited to meeting even the strictest compliance standards.
• No interruption of work: Operations can be performed 24/7 as these bots can work tirelessly and autonomously without requiring staff to manually trigger bots to initiate business processes. If a human does need to intervene, it is to make a decision or resolve an error.
• Existing systems remain in place: Unlike traditional automation initiatives that may require extensive developer resources to integrate across multiple applications, RPA involves no disruption to underlying systems. Robots work across the presentation layer of existing applications just as a person does. This is especially useful for legacy systems, where APIs may not be immediately available, or in situations where organizations do not have the resources to develop a deep level of integration with existing applications.
• Improved employee morale and employee experience: Employees will have more time to invest their talents in more engaging and interesting work. Bots enable workers to offload manual offload tasks like filling out forms, data entry and looking up information from websites, so workers can focus on strategy and revenue-producing activities.
• Increased productivity: Process cycle times are more efficient and can be completed at a faster speed compared with manual process approaches.

As RPA advances even further, future generations of the technology will only bring additional value. Advanced cognitive capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence will allow bots to more intelligently interpret the interfaces they work across, better handle errors, and manipulate unstructured data. Machine learning allows bots to recognize patterns over time; this means that when a process requires human intervention, a bot learns and acts autonomously when the situation happens again.