What is robotic process automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation: Definition

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a revolutionary business process automation technology that eliminates tedious tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-value work while offering better and more flexible business process support. In short, RPA processes drive business efficiency and accuracy by automating and standardizing repeatable business processes using virtual business assistants or bots.

Is RPA right for your business processes?

RPA can enhance your intelligent automation capabilities and extend the business value of your applications, especially as your organization embarks on digital transformation. An RPA solution can fill the gaps in your processes and communicate with existing business systems seamlessly, and it’s frequently used across industries and departments, namely, accounts payable, human resources, finance, insurance and customer service.

It can easily be programmed to do basic, repetitive tasks across applications to speed up processes. The essential criteria, when determining if RPA processes fit, are processes that must:

• Be rule-based
• Be repeated at regular intervals or have a predefined prompt
• Have defined inputs and outputs
• Have sufficient volume

Some of the situations where you can use RPA processes to replace manual processes include:

• Performing high-volume, repetitive transactions
• Extracting and reformatting data into reports and dashboards
• Merging data from multiple locations and systems
• Collecting social media statistics
• Generating emails and filling out forms

Benefits of RPA

Organizations that leverage RPA technology achieve significant gains, which can include:

• Increased accuracy and compliance: RPA enables departments to automate repetitive and rule-based tasks resulting in accelerated business cycles. RPA technology eliminates human error as tasks are done consistently every time. Plus, all steps are recorded and automatically checked against regulations to ensure compliance using audit trails for easy tracking.
• Increased visibility and speed: RPA can accelerate tasks by minimizing the need for human intervention. Using dashboards and reporting analytics, RPA provides visibility into process bottlenecks and makes it easier to analyze and optimize processes.
• Improved productivity and efficiency: With RPA processes, operations can run autonomously, completing manual tasks using bots while employees only need to intervene to make decisions. This means employees can focus on higher-value activities resulting in increased engagement and optimized utilization.
• Reduced costs: Being able to complete tasks much faster than manual approaches and in a shorter, more efficient cycle translates to saved costs in terms of efficiency and productivity, as well as utilization.
• Easily configurable and scalable across operations: Using RPA processes to integrate your legacy systems with core systems will not be an issue. Plus, with low-code configuration, RPA software is easy to build and manage, and it requires minimal effort from your IT teams. This makes it easily scalable across business operations and allows you to change processes in the software with zero or minimal downtime.

Enhance your content services with RPA

Now more than ever, it is imperative for organizations to leverage automation tools to address business challenges as part of digital transformation initiatives. The addition of RPA technology is an integral component of Hyland’s intelligent automation strategy.

Beyond merely automating processes, Hyland RPA offers intelligent components for improved efficiency, smart tracking of cognitive decisions and much more. Hyland RPA extends the process automation capabilities of Hyland’s industry-leading content services platform, allowing organizations to easily enhance their solutions with robust RPA processes.