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Insurance
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Banking & Financial Services
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Manufacturing
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Retail
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Telecom
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HealthCare
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Supply Chain Management
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Customer Service
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Finance and Accounting
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IT Operations
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Human Resources
Analysts predict that disruptive technologies like Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, could potentially automate the work in the insurance sector to a great extent. RPA is a new breed of technology that promises great potential and advantages for insurers. But it can lead to high risk of failure if not implemented effectively. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools can help in automating business functions in the insurance sector. Any insurance company, whether providers of car insurance, health insurance, property insurance or travel insurance are highly indulged in back-office process. Insurance companies deal with a variety of paper work. This means, employees must manual enter information from various data sources. Process is times consuming and costly, even it can lead to errors. Many companies are left with old systems that no longer provide insurance sector growth. A successful RPA implementation can free up capacity at an enterprise level while improving customer experience and minimizing operational risks. Freed from mundane and routine tasks, back-office staff can be redeployed into front-office roles where they can focus on complex customer demands and generate growth.
With RPA in insurance, more and more insurers are now able to reduce costs and improve processing time for their policies, resulting in delighted customers and improved organizational productivity.
Claims processing is data and document intensive process, which requires collection of a vast amount of information from varying and disparate sources. A manual claims process can be very lengthy and cumbersome which could create serious dissatisfaction amongst customers and hamper both customer service and operations.
Robotic Process Automation enables the claims to be processed at a much faster pace by automating manual labor intensive processes of gathering data from various sources, data entry and validation, and routing of document. The resultant process efficiency, increase in cost savings and reduction in errors greatly helps in the boosting the Insurance Company’s profitability.
Underwriting process comprises of collection of huge amount data from multiple sources for assessing and analyzing risks and exposure associated with a potential customer. As the manual process is very time consuming and easily take up to a couple of weeks and affect
Robotic Process Automation allows accurate collection and processing of data from various data sources automatically and in much faster pace. It will help in freeing capacity and will also ensure accuracy and deliver the work in a timely manner, allowing more new customers to come, with the faster response times.
Claims processing is data and document intensive process, which requires collection of a vast amount of information from varying and disparate sources. A manual claims process can be very lengthy and cumbersome which could create serious dissatisfaction amongst customers and hamper both customer service and operations.
Robotic Process Automation enables the claims to be processed at a much faster pace by automating manual labor intensive processes of gathering data from various sources, data entry and validation, and routing of document. The resultant process efficiency, increase in cost savings and reduction in errors greatly helps in the boosting the Insurance Company’s profitability.
Underwriting process comprises of collection of huge amount data from multiple sources for assessing and analyzing risks and exposure associated with a potential customer. As the manual process is very time consuming and easily take up to a couple of weeks.
Robotic Process Automation allows accurate collection and processing of data from various data sources automatically and in much faster pace. It will help in freeing capacity and will also ensure accuracy and deliver the work in a timely manner, allowing more new customers to come, with the faster response times.
AI and Analytics can give insights to insurers for risks. This will help for personalized flexible covers and move from being risk insurers to risk mitigators with services for alerts, repairs and rewards. RPA can analyze the claim history of reports from past years and provide the insights based on previous losses.
An insurance company can improve their processes only if there are some means to gauge whatever they are doing. The implementation of RPA makes the gauging much easier. All the processes or workflows which are taken care by RPA can be tracked and recorded at each step. It can provide the insurance company with the details like the transactions processed, the exceptions encountered etc. These values can help them in improving their process, reducing workload from the staff and also to make their customers happy.
Policy administration links all the functions of an insurer such as quoting, assessment, underwriting to distributing customer services. –. Current policy administration systems that have been around for decades are expensive and high-maintenance. They cannot scale quickly enough to meet the growing demands of customers or support business growth.
While current management softwares & systems have saved us a lot of time and labor, they have also introduced extensive navigation through multiple applications which in turn gives rise to operational inefficiency.
RPA in Insurance allows all key players within each process or each silo to accomplish a plethora of operations easily without involving vast navigation across systems. It essentially automates transactional and administrative parts of activities such as accounting, settlements, risk capture, credit control, tax, and regulatory compliances.
Some of the benefits of RPA in Insurance sector are:
RPA can improve insurance operations efficiency
It can help in validating the data for the nominee
Can eliminate Backlogs process and improve service levels.
Track nominee’s data using RPA software precisely.
Scale up the process with ease using RPA Software
Can reduce lot of back-office process
Can Streamlines claim process
Automate the entire workflows and streamlined lot of operational activities
The Banking and Finance industry has gone advanced over the last few years. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been effective and powerful tool. Until robotic process automation was evolved as a solution for the banking industry, professionals struggled to connect the many legacy systems being used in this sector. RPA has helped to great extent to manage and retrieve the information effectively. It has also streamlined a wide variety of back office processes that once consumed lot of time for the officials, thus reducing the delays in these processes and significantly reduce the need for human involvement. Some of these back office processes which have been automated are detailed below.
As this process requires several documents requiring manual verification, Customer onboarding in banks is a long, drawn-out process. RPA simplifies this process with by capturing data from these verification documents using OCR technology which can then be mapped against the information provided by the customer in the registration form. On automatic verification, this data can then be ported into the customer management systems, thus assisting in avoiding manual errors while saving both time and effort of the employees.
Every customer facing employee of the bank deals with multiple queries during the course of the day. These queries may range from account information to balance information to application status making it difficult to respond within low response times. RPA can automate such rule based processes to respond to such queries in real time thus reducing turnaround times and free up human resources to conduct more critical tasks.
RPA along with artificial intelligence can be used to resolve queries which needs decision making. Chabots can understand the natural language with the help of NLP, and chat with customer and respond like human.
Use of RPA in the account opening process to extract data from the registration forms and updating the core banking applications has resulted in elimination of errors and reduction in time as opposed to when done manually. The account opening process thus becomes much more straightforward, quicker, and accurate resulting in a sharp reduction in TAT while, at the same time, maintaining complete operational accuracy and mitigated costs.
One of the major reasons for the closure of accounts is due to the non-compliance in the KYC process as the client may not have provided the mandatory documentary proofs required for operating the account. The number of account closure requests that banks have to deal with monthly is enormous. Using RPA helps the bank in tracking these accounts and sending out notifications and reminders for the documents which are required to complete the process. Using RPA banks can also process the account closure requests in the rule-based form in short duration with 100% accuracy.
With the banking industry being a highly regulated one, compliance to all regulations is always a challenging task for banks. RPA facilitates the adherence of banks to the standards. With the help of RPA full audit trails for each & every process can be generated in banking, thus reducing business risks while maintain high process compliance. Not only does this help in reducing the operational costs, but also saves the time taken to perform the task which otherwise would have been done manually with inherent risk of errors.
Providing consumer loans is one of the critical areas of service for any financial institution. This process is extremely process-driven and time-consuming which makes it extremely suitable for RPA adoption. RPA technology can be used to effortlessly handle the processes with clearly defined rules and exceptions, thus reducing the loan processing time tremendously. As a result, the loans can be approved much faster, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.
Banking regulators have stipulated the Banking customers to fill the Know Your Customer (KYC) form for opening or operating a bank account. For the bank this process requires a huge volume of customer details to be validated within a short duration making the adoption of RPA technology inevitable. The process involves matching and validating the customer information provided with customer’s previously known records. RPA implementation proved instrumental in terms of saving both time and cost as compared to traditional banking solutions. This quick process of validation has enhanced customer experience and has led to improved accuracy in the customer data.
Processing of credit card applications is another time consuming process which would typically take days for validating customer documents submitted during application for the credit card. The long waiting period would often lead to customer dissatisfaction and in some cases lead to the cancelation of the request by a customer. Using RPA banks can now speed up the process and cut down on time by automating collection of customer documents, conducting of credit checks and background checks, and based on set parameters help make quick decisions to approve/disapprove the application with a rule-based approach. By using RPA, the whole process has been perfectly streamlined.
Banks need to routinely prepare reports on their processes as part of the compliance and present it to various stakeholders. Using RPA the banks can prepare these reports with a high level of accuracy. This involves gathering of data from various IT systems, validating the data and arranging it in the required templates which are understandable to everyone. It can further be scheduled to send these reports out to the different sources. Not only does this help in reducing the operational costs, but also saves the time taken to perform the task.
Some of the benefits of RPA in Banking and Finance:
Cost effective
Increased operational efficiency
Reduced Business Response Time
Faster implementation
Leverages Existing Infrastructure
Scalability
Availability
Manufacturing, the backbone of the global economy has for long been the early adopters of robotics to perform daily activities in the manufacturing plant. However, the time-intensive processes that support the production line such as procurement, regulatory compliance, or inventory management-still largely rely on people-driven processes. And now to stay competitive these organizations have started to adapt and optimize these often complex and intertwined processes along the manufacturing value chain. Using RPA in their back office processes they have been able to automate certain activities that minimize human errors and maximize productivity. By automating back-office and operational processes within the manufacturing value chain the manufacturers have been able to move faster and more effectively, while at the same time been able to reduce costs and accelerating time-to-market.
Functional areas where RPA can be effectively used
- Customer support and communication
- Purchase Order Management
- Invoice Management
- Inventory reports
- Accounting and Finance
- Logistics
- Transportation management
- Bill of Material Generation
- Order fulfillment
- ERP Management
- Workflow Management
- Demand and Supply planning
- Report Automation
- Regulatory compliance
Bill of Material (BOM) is a crucial document in the manufacturing industry as it comprises a detailed list of raw materials, components, sub-components, and other material required for building a product. All the employees in the company refer the document to know what to purchase, how to purchase, where to purchase, and for detailed instructions such as how to assemble a product and pack it. The document is so critical to the manufacturing companies that even a single miss or an error could lead to issues such as inferior material planning, inaccurate product cost, elevated production cost, and even delay in shipment, which is why RPA becomes so significant in the manufacturing industry.
While basic automation tools such as macro-based applets, screen scraping tools, and product-specific workflows are helpful in automating certain activities under BOM, RPA specifically helps in enhancing process automation by completely replicating the steps that a human does in generating BOM. A significant point to note here is unlike the older automation tools, non-technical users can also use RPA. It is less complex and highly agile.
When you think of manufacturing, invoices from the vendors are the first thing that comes to our minds. Invoice processing is a time-consumer and excruciating process. You have to go through each of the invoice, crosscheck them, send them for approval, and so on. The entire process not just takes your time, but it is also prone to errors due to multiple scrutiny and change of hands. RPA helps in scanning, reading and checking the invoices against the Purchase order, sending the invoice automatically for approval to the concerned department to fix the discrepancies, entering the invoice into the accounting system once it is fixed, and finally marking the purchase order as completed. Similarly, the manual processing of purchase order and the non-conformity in order information led to delay of 25-30 minutes in processing the order.
RPA helps in verifying the orders, pulling the data from several systems, checking the billing, and verifying them to ensure that there are no duplicate orders placed. This systematic approach helps manufacturing companies in reducing the order-to-fulfillment time and increasing the number of orders fulfilled per month.
Some of the benefits of RPA in Manufacturing Sector:
Optimize time-bound and routine processes
Maximize productivity and increases the go-to-market speed
Cost reductions due to minimal human errors
Increases agility across operations
Retail Industries progressively perceive that the advantages of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) stretch out long ways past fundamental cost decrease and expanded profitability. By executing routine tasks faster and more accurately and consistently than humans, smart tools are being applied to a wide range of generic back office processes in retail sector. RPA is coming up with solving the variety of specific challenges.
Areas where RPA will make a difference:
RPA helps in designing entirely automated onboarding process for vendors and customers on boarding and includes automatic status communications as well as full integration of the information with your internal backend systems.
In the age of increasing e-commerce, Product returns are a very vital process among the various retail processes. Product returns are a cost to the retailer and processing returns manually can be a really time consuming task and if their processing is done manually, it may further increase the costs. RPA effectively manages the returns and does all the required changes needed in altering the inventory database and customers’ billing.
Providing 24X7 customer support has become an integral part of the retail industry. For e-commerce, providing customer support and sending real time updates to customers has become really important.
RPA can automate such rule based processes to respond to such queries in real time. With RPA, companies can make their customer support more quick and convenient thus reducing turnaround times and free up human resources to conduct more critical tasks. It also allows resolving queries which needs decision making. RPA helps manage customer records across multiple systems and process changes with ease. BOTs ensure all of your CRM information is synchronized as they link systems, processes and activities.
When done manually demand and supply planning is a burdensome task which requires gathering vast amounts of data, formatting this data and run simulations and a host of other activities to come up with a plan which is time consuming and prone to errors. With the use of RPA in the retail sector these tasks can be automated and streamlined resulting in improved satisfaction of all the stake holders.
This sits at the core of every ecommerce operation enabling the retailer to procure goods from the manufacturer to the consumer. This transition of goods is heavily dependent on the back office which manages inventory levels, tracks shipments, manage customer queries, notify dispatch status etc. all of which are time consuming manual processes prone to errors. This makes these back office processes prime candidates for RPA implementation. As communication is vital for supply chain success, automation of emails would also facilitate better communication between customers, suppliers and distributors.
For any Retail organization Analytics is key to take meaningful decisions. As a low margin industry, accuracy and efficiency is the key to success in the retail industry. Comprehensive analysis of large amounts of sales data is fundamental for marketing, Product trends and consumer behavior analysis. Fluctuations in market demand, delay in sales analytics can cause a huge impact on business. Teams in retail rely on excel sheets to track information. This is time consuming as it takes significant time to consolidate and send these numbers for analysis. RPA can process structured as well as unstructured data in excel spreadsheets and provide the necessary reports. RPA analytics also helps in forecasting or predictive analysis, which supports stock optimization.
Some of the benefits of RPA in Manufacturing Sector:
Optimize time-bound and routine processes
Maximize productivity and increases the go-to-market speed
Cost reductions due to minimal human errors
Increases agility across operations
Telecom service providers are facing declining revenues as their services have become increasingly commoditized with the onslaught of the digital services provided by the over the top (OTT) services. These new service offerings are disrupting the telecom business models while re-shaping customer expectations. Additionally with the advent of IoT, there is a significant increase in connected devices globally and technologies like 5G will boost the number of connected devices and users even further. But with increased customer expectation and competition, telecom companies need efficient and faster operations
Telecoms need to move towards Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to boost customer service, improve data quality, and reduce cost while driving operational efficiency. This technology plays a vital role in transforming the entire industry by bringing efficiency across all functions from customer care to and enterprise management to operations and supply chain. This will not only reduce the operating expenses but boost customer responsiveness.
There are a lot processes in the telecom industry which are highly manual, voluminous, repetitive and rule-based. Processes listed below are such use cases which can be automated with the help of RPA
- Order Entry
- Order Validation
- Customer Qualification
- Credit Check
- Service Testing
- Service Activation
- Feasibility check
- Address Check
- Billing
- Revenue Management
- Service Provisioning
- Network Management
Some of the benefits of RPA in Manufacturing Sector:
Efficient customer support
Reduced network downtime
Smarter and accurate decision making
Reduced error and time in the back office and mundane tasks
Accurate billing process
Integrated systems improve reporting and information availability
As patient numbers grow, the amount of data collected and processed by Health care organizations becomes challenging as it includes data from all sorts of sources like Third party/Insurance portals, HR and ERP applications, Clinical and Medical applications, scheduling portals etc. Healthcare providers are challenged with managing levels of inventory, supporting digitization of patient files, optimizing appointment scheduling, and executing billing and claims processing.
Managing the flow of information across all these channels is a tedious and complicated job. Being labor intensive, these tasks are a huge drain on resources if done manually. This is where Robotic Process Automation in Healthcare comes into the picture. To help overcome these operational pain points, more and more healthcare providers are embracing RPA to alleviate these challenges and drive enhanced efficiency and growth. With the help of RPA, any manual task which is repetitive in nature and, critical to the functioning and processing of healthcare can be automated to bring in efficiency and accuracy, freeing back office employees to be utilized in offering more direct, value-based patient care at lower costs and increased efficiency.
Explained below is a list of processes where RPA will assist healthcare organizations increase operational efficiency and eliminating human errors.
Bots can streamline the patient’s appointments according to parameters such as diagnosis, location, insurance carrier, personal preferences, doctor availability etc. making it easier for the call center staff and increasing customer satisfaction while evenly distributing appointments across doctors’ working hours.
Bots can streamline the patient’s appointments according to parameters such as diagnosis, location, insurance carrier, personal preferences, doctor availability etc. making it easier for the call center staff and increasing customer satisfaction while evenly distributing appointments across doctors’ working hours.
Bots are used to accurately bill the patients for all the costs involved such as costs for diagnostic tests, room charges, costs of surgeries and medicines, food, doctor fees etc. and notify the patient of their bill amount. Introduction of Bots in the invoicing process can improve the accuracy and bring down human errors to a great degree. This reduction in errors will enable healthcare providers to reduce payment delays.
Some of the benefits of RPA in Manufacturing Sector:
Increased efficiencies as BOTs work 24X7
Improved accuracy as human errors are reduced
Decreased operational costs
Increased productivity as BOTs do repetitive tasks
Improved customer satisfaction
Over the years, enterprises have invested millions of dollars in embracing some types of SCM Supply Chain Management system. But now digital transformation is playing a vital role in supply chain management and changing the way these enterprises conduct operations, fulfill orders and deliver products. RPA is transforming logistics and supply chains as there are several aspects of supply chain management which are very well-suited for RPA. RPA automates critical yet repetitive processes, driving efficiency and faster deliveries in an industry driven by speed and precision.
RPA is being used in supply chain management to automate and accelerate tasks that were once performed manually. These include customer relationship management & ordering, supplier relationship management & procurement, transportation & logistics, and supply & demand planning as described below.
Many businesses utilize disparate information systems for business functions such as CRM, ERP, accounting etc. For every transaction done for a customer the customer information is updated in multiple systems for that particular business function. For an effective customer service this needs to be regularly updated across all systems. This task of updating is usually done manually and is time consuming as well as error prone when the volumes may be high. Such manual tasks spanning multiple information systems are a prime candidate to automate using RPA. This results in up to date customer information across all systems allowing customer service teams in providing quality customer service while providing assistance to customers and strengthen the customer relationship.
Vendor selection is one among the time-consuming operations in SCM as it includes loads of manual processes like:
- Requisition preparation
- Shortlisted vendor Communication with vendors
- Document verification and credits evaluation
- Vendor finalization
The above processes are rule based and hence with you finalize the vendor selection in accordance with predefined criteria. RPA bots can complete these steps in a very short time to accomplish as against several hours if done manually. Bots can improve efficiency by offering an automated approval workflow.
For an organization to have the right product mix and reduce prices, it becomes imperative to have more than one supplier, thus making supplier relationship management a very important task. This involves selecting new suppliers, negotiating contracts, onboarding them into the system, monitoring their performance.
To minimize risks, optimize the product mix and reduce procurement costs, it is often necessary to adjust supplier relationships. These processes typically have many manual steps, such as forms to be filled, documents to be created and messages to be sent. RPA can automate these manual tasks, and even take rules-based decisions, leaving discretionary decisions to humans, so that effort involved is minimized. The products offered and their prices for any given supplier keeping varying over time and their catalog needs to be updated on a regular basis. The process of updating the catalogs can benefit greatly from RPA, as the effort, cost, and time taken for updating supplier catalogs would be greatly reduced, and the error rate would also decrease. Notifications can also be generated automatically based on business rules.
The efficiency of a supply chain depends on the ability of the organization to forecast its inventory needs. This process involves examining complex data sets such as current inventory levels, custom orders, sales targets, historical sales data, market indicators, seasonal fluctuations, price trends, to name just a few. And as this data comes from various sources like vendors, customers, and internal teams it can be time consuming and prone to errors. Correlation of all this data can be challenging and consuming. Further, rules, corrections and notifications may need to be applied, and the entire process needs to be repeated frequently.
With the help of RPA it becomes easy and more efficient to ingest and analyze this data by gathering and merging information, preparing data for manual analysis, and sharing it with planners. With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, RPA bot predict the demands and enables the procurement team to make more accurate forecasts.
To ensure products as well as spares to meet the business demands are readily available it is extremely crucial to be aware of the inventory levels. Thus inventory becomes the backbone of a supply chains. Managing inventory at optimal levels while tracking data along the chain can be extremely complex. Manually tracking of each and every item which can run into thousands as they move across service areas is time-consuming and prone to error.
RPA helps continuously monitor inventory as it flows throughout the warehouse and notify when levels are low. It also helps tracking inventory as it flows throughout the warehouse from receiving to shelves to production to shipping. In the best case, bots can reorder the products that go below a threshold level.
Transportation and Logistics is driven by time-critical, manual tasks where information is managed in electronic or paper-based documents such as scheduling, bill of lading, tracking shipments, proof-of-delivery and invoices that typically require staff to work with multiple forms, labels, applications, websites, etc.
Automation of such tasks allows accurate and real-time tracking of shipments, which further aids planning. RPA brings efficiency to these tasks while saving time and reducing errors. Software bots work 24/7, providing an efficient and scalable freight management workflow.
Customer service automation is a typical use-case of RPA as many companies deal with customers on a range of predictable, repetitive requests. Enterprises can automate common, reproducible agent tasks that are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Customer services can significantly reduce the time spent on identifying customers and deliver better customer support with a single customer view using RPA. As a result, customer service reps can reach to information faster and eliminate waiting times for your customers.
RPA can deliver the answers customers need around the clock particularly where customer cases are routine and straight forward. Gathering information is difficult for the service agent as they have to toggle from one system to the next, verifying the account in the CRM while all the other relevant customer information such as current order status, order history, and pending/support tickets maybe in the ERP and Ticketing system. Automation helps sorting queries and offer initial responses to customers. It can segregate queries into different categories and this sorting ensures the queries reach the right customer care agent for a quick resolution without the call being transferred from one executive to another.
Customer agents take the brunt of the burden of change or release of new products and services with more complex features at a higher rate than ever before. For example an e-commerce portal receives multiple customer complaints across various channels. RPA helps in processing all the required information, organize and sort in the required format, and resolve the complaint if it follows a pre-defined workflow just like an agent would do. The customer only needs to select and input the data as required. RPA provides faster resolutions with higher accuracy besides generating detailed reports for a deeper analysis that the company can use to prevent further incidents.
An RPA-enabled process can provide clients with immediate data insights, be it the progress of an order or the delivery status of any particular order. RPA can also help human customer service assistants get faster access to up to date, relevant customer data. Since the bots quickly process vast amounts of unstructured data into a coherent whole, they can be applied beyond customer services to help automatically prepare, analyze and interpret data.
Besides direct savings on money and time, RPA facilitates better resource utilization as customer support agents will be able to focus on tickets that need human judgment. Reducing the handling time of interactions will affect workforce planners’ to adjust your staffing and provide the ability to forecast and schedule agents. RPA also allows the customer support agents to focus on up-leveling their skills and nurturing customer relationships. And this will continue as automation improves and queries become more complex and take longer to resolve.
- Updating Client Profiles
- Resolving Disputes
- Order Processing
- Billing customers
- Sending Notifications
- Closing Fraudulent Accounts
- Reporting
When it comes to overcome the gaps in customer support and service operations of your business, RPA is a game changer. The impact of this technology is huge and achieving a good ROI is assured. The customer experience when they reach out to your agents sets the reputation of your company and your brand, and hence is vital for business. The interaction is proof of how your business cares for its customers and any new business is dependent on this interaction. RPA allows you to provide a high level of customer experience allowing your business to be relevant amidst your competitors.
Bill of Material (BOM) is a crucial document in the manufacturing industry as it comprises a detailed list of raw materials, components, sub-components, and other material required for building a product. All the employees in the company refer the document to know what to purchase, how to purchase, where to purchase, and for detailed instructions such as how to assemble a product and pack it. The document is so critical to the manufacturing companies that even a single miss or an error could lead to issues such as inferior material planning, inaccurate product cost, elevated production cost, and even delay in shipment, which is why RPA becomes so significant in the manufacturing industry.
While basic automation tools such as macro-based applets, screen scraping tools, and product-specific workflows are helpful in automating certain activities under BOM, RPA specifically helps in enhancing process automation by completely replicating the steps that a human does in generating BOM. A significant point to note here is unlike the older automation tools, non-technical users can also use RPA. It is less complex and highly agile.
- Customer onboarding: As with vendors, new customers must be vetted and on-boarded and their data periodically validated and updated.
- Supplier pricing comparisons: BOT collects prices and other data from multiple suppliers for comparison and preparation of customer quote accurately in short time.
- Delivery reconciliation: BOT helps reconcile delivery notes with purchase orders to validate orders against shipments and approve all matching orders.
- Data extraction: BOT gathers transactions recorded in journals from all the businesses, departments and divisions, reconciles and consolidates them in the ERP.
- Data management: Business-critical function of aggregating and analyzing financial and operational performance is done by the BOT efficiently and in record time to help gain insight into the business.
- Supporting financial closure: The process requires posting data from sources such as Excel to these sub-ledgers, a tedious undertaking that RPA can mitigate
- Account Management: Setup and maintain processes for paying different vendors. Create workflows for accounts payable approvals.
- Payments: Enter data to complete payment preparation and processing. Process payments and bulk payment files for sub-system journal entries.
- Customer Management: maintain a customer master file and credit approvals. Route and process customer orders.
- Payments: Process accounts receivable cash receipts. Send late payment notifications.
- Download subaccount balances into pre-approved formats.
- Upload transaction data from various sub-systems and different formats.
- Perform data validation and exception research and handling.
- Create and balance journal entries, noting and remediating discrepancies.
The IT landscape today is constantly evolving both in terms of business environment and technological landscape. While at the same time most of the processes in IT operations are still manual intensive and repetitive. With the help of RPA technology IT managers can streamline such processes to increase their process quality, improve operational efficiency and effectiveness and in turn reduce overheads while enhancing the productivity. Moreover the advantage of the technology is that it can be integrated with the existing infrastructure at no extra cost.
Much of backup and recovery management, patching updates including validation and testing, and ticketing updates are routine and repetitive tasks which the employees find very mundane. hence these are typical processes which can be assigned to the BOTs while the employees can be assigned to tasks which provide a sense of satisfaction.
Research shows that nearly half the help desk calls are requests for password resets. This process is a prime candidate for automation since these requests for password resets are highly transactional, repeatable, have constant structure, and few exceptions. This is achieved with BOTS armed with specific templates (request, acknowledgment, etc.), having access to the IT service management (ITSM) tool for active directory activities. Upon receiving the reset request the BOT classifies the service request based on the priority defined (High or Low) based on the urgency. It then logs into the Citrix app where it resets the password and sends the new password to the user and marks the status of the service request as resolved. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
For large organizations managing user credentials across multiple or diverse information systems is a major operational challenge as well as a cost arising from maintaining a large IT team to handle such tasks. RPA helps by allowing bots to handle activities like account creation, email address creation, etc.
On receiving the user profile information in the form of a daily report template, the BOT with access to email exchanges and the ITSM tool, can use that information structured in accordance with on-boarding templates and generate a service request. It can then set up an exchange account, provide the default access credentials, notify the HR/Reporting Manager about the creation of the accounts. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
Sending of notifications involves structured information and has predetermined rules and hence can be automated. In most organizations this is a manual back office process which involves manual sending of hundreds of email notifications daily with the help of Exchange, Excel and ITSM tool making it complex and inefficient.
Using RPA in this instance, the BOT when triggered logs into the ITSM tool and captures the pending cases from a report and sends emails as per user preference. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
Using RPA, the BOTs using automated diagnostics can select the issues that can be remedied by means of simple, rule based algorithms. Complex processes requiring decision making can be moved to the service desk to be done manually by the IT teams. Due to the accuracy and availability of the BOTs, this automation reduces the response times significantly and thus increasing customer satisfaction.
Network technology, such as load balancers or firewalls, requires constant monitoring and measurements. BOTs help manage the performance of the network and run instant updates whenever the need arises and provides continued network interconnectedness.
The HR department of any business is riddled with repetitive and voluminous tasks which are time-consuming, and still manual-driven. This high degree of reliance on labor is costly and inefficient and may often lead to errors or non-compliance of regulations.
By leveraging RPA the organization significantly improve efficiency and lower operational costs. Using RPA for repetitive processes done manually will also provide the HR team with additional bandwidth which can be deployed towards strategic activities which are non-clerical thus benefiting the enterprise as a whole.
Here are a few HR tasks that can easily be optimized using RPA:
Manual screening of all resumes and online application forms to identify candidates for interviews are currently done by the HR teams manually. This is a very time consuming process with one hire taking up to 50 – 75 hours of the HR time for a single hire.
Using RPA can bring down this time and the related operational costs by letting the BOT gather and screen resumes and online application forms, compare the information against relevant job requisitions and perform the necessary checks. RPA thus promises the shortlisting of the best matched candidates in the shortest timeframe. Furthermore notifications for interviews, feedback or rejections can be generated based upon predefined rules
This process has multiple attributes like creating the offer letter, sending out the letters and tracking responses which my come with certain documents in attachments. Contents of the letter should be as per the expectations of the desired candidate as well comply with the company policies and regulations for which data may be in various repositories. Doing this manually is cumbersome and prone to errors.
With the help of RPA, offer letters can be created with the use of templates and application of diverse rules for checking data as well as policies and regulations stored in the various systems and databases within the organization. Once created they are then sent out to the desired candidates as well as received response and documents and sort and store the received documents as per desired rules.
On the joining of a new candidate into your organization, the HR team is usually responsible create the email id, new user account, access to various IT systems, mailing groups, the necessary IT equipment. All this is varies depending on the candidate’s job profile and the company policies. In case of large organizations there are many parties and systems involved in this process that need to be orchestrated. And getting this done manually would take nearly the whole of the new employee’s first day at the very least.
As the on-boarding process is a very rule based process, this becomes an ideal candidate for automation and implementation of RPA BOTs automatically trigger the predefined onboarding process once the new user account is created. Business rules assigned to the user profile guide robots to take decisions such as systems to which access should be granted. As a final step of the process, the Bots can also send the predefined onboarding documents to the new hire. Here RPA ensures that the new employee is on boarded and functional within the first few hours of arrival on the first day and also makes sure that the complete process is streamlined and error-free
Most of the payroll processes in large organizations are rule-based and includes a large amount of data entry tasks. One major challenge for the traditional HR systems is that compliance, payroll and security requirements offer a limited ability to standardize the processes. This leads to inaccurate data, incorrect submissions, and delays in payment
Hence it is considered as the perfect function that can be automated with RPA platform that enhances the accuracy and minimizes processing time. RPA can be implemented to verify the consistency of payroll system employee data by checking it against the data in various other systems that the data may reside in. Paychecks, benefits, allowances and reimbursements can all be automatically tracked and produced by bots to avoid inaccurate submission and delays. It thus ensures full compliance with rules and regulations and improves service quality, while increases accuracy and reduces processing time – especially when the company has a considerable number of employees.
The HR teams in all organizations be it small or big manage and track vast amounts of data related to existing employees, new hires, applicants and past employees, policy and regulatory compliance, payroll, benefits, and reimbursements. Even with the best of HR solutions in place there are many tasks that require manual entry, updating, and maintenance across multiple, disparate databases, thus making these tasks cumbersome and prone to error.
RPA can automate these menial manual tasks and ensures accurate data handling throughout the employee lifecycle by entering the data accurately and continued by data cleansing activities to ensure consistency across multiple systems in various formats. As data is complete, accurate and consistent, it ensures better compliance to regulatory and company policies.
Reporting requires the right data in the right format pointing to the right indicators in order to make smart decisions. This may be rather a difficult endeavor and time consuming in the case of HR operations where the employee related data is present across several disparate systems all over the organization.
RPA bots are implemented to assure the automated report generations, including data capture and cleaning. It can be implemented to fulfill pre-populating complex periodic reporting requirements for prescriptive and predictive HR analyses. With the automatic collection, preparation and visualization of relevant data, it ensures significant timesaving while ensuring data consistency.
RPA bots are implemented to assure the automated report generations, including data capture and cleaning. It can be implemented to fulfill pre-populating complex periodic reporting requirements for prescriptive and predictive HR analyses. With the automatic collection, preparation and visualization of relevant data, it ensures significant timesaving while ensuring data consistency.
