With advancements in technology, there has been a significant change in the way business organizations function. It is transforming the way industries are serving their customers and the markets in which they compete. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) represent the new age of automation and can outperform humans in various ways. However, machines cannot achieve the required accuracy without significant effort from humans. New technologies like RPA help to minimize the burden of spending hours in front of the computer entering data manually and it also helps to save time. To ensure accuracy of business processes and data, organizations will have to rely on business process outsourcing companies.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an application of technology that uses business logic and structured inputs that aim at automating business processes. With RPA tools, businesses can configure software to capture and interpret applications for transaction processes, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems. In simple terms, RPA is a form of business process automation that helps to define a set of instructions for a robot. RPA robots have the ability to mimic majority of the human computer interactions to carry out a number of error-free tasks, at high volume and speed.
Why Is RPA Important and How Does It Help Businesses?
According to a recent report by Gartner, RPA revenue will reach close to $2 billion this year, and will continue to rise at double-digit rates beyond 2024. As more and more organizations implement it worldwide, RPA is quickly becoming a ubiquitous and important tool for businesses to gain competitive advantage. The key driver for RPA is the ability to enhance the process quality, speed and productivity, each of which is increasingly important as businesses try to meet the demands of cost reduction. In the last few years there has been consistent growth in RPA. According to Gartner forecast, the use of RPA will continue to grow in the coming years and in 2022, 90 percent of large enterprises are expected to adopt RPA. Here is why RPA is important for businesses:
- Better speed, quality, and productivity: RPA bots can be trained to undertake repetitive and un-intelligent tasks faster and more accurately than humans can.
- Getting additional value from big data: Many organizations generate several volumes of data that they may not be able to process well. These data are used to gain valuable insights and drive greater efficiencies. RPA helps to resolve these issues by going through large datasets, both structured and unstructured. This RPA helps organizations make use of the data that they have collected.
- Free up employees for better and productive tasks: RPA provides the opportunity for employees to be relieved of their work and focus more on more valuable and productive tasks. With RPA, employees can leave tedious and repetitive work behind, and focus on core activities of the business. This will help improve the productivity of the organization.
- Become more adaptable to change: Organizations are now recovering from the disruption caused by COVID-19 and becoming more agile and nimble in dealing with change. Resilience and adaptability are vital to overcome current and future challenges. With RPA, organizations can speed up processes while reducing costs, ensuring organizations are ready to deal with disruption and change.
In the next few years, we can expect a universal adoption of RPA. Business leaders expect RPA to improve accuracy of reporting, compliance, and productivity, and minimize cost. In spite of all these advantages, RPA still has some shortcomings. Although it claims to rectify any human errors, it is not as good as humans at processing scanned images and unstructured data. RPA tools are solely focused on the task that is set on them. This can be dangerous for a business because, any minor error in data entry can lead to wrong decisions or the same error can be repeated across multiple entries. This shows that RPA can never replace human interactions. So, outsourcing services cannot be eliminated from the business world and business process outsourcing companies still hold their relevance in this new digital world. Businesses are greatly dependent on various data and RPA serves as a solution to manage and retrieve information efficiently. Similarly, outsourcing data processing is also important as it helps to convert raw data into knowledge-intensive resources that will significantly help in reducing the operating and management cost, and produce optimum results with utmost accuracy.
