RPA Use Cases

There are many use cases that occur in business situations where these activities take place. The following list of use cases provides an indication of the generic situations which will need to be interpreted to identify specific situations in individual companies.

Knowing when to use RPA and when not to use it is often a key decision to ensure success of a solution.

Most businesses will use a number of application packages (e.g. Finance, ERP, HR, Logistics). Each application package will provide core functionality, but where there is a business requirement that is not delivered in the current functionality or where it is split across application packages a solution could be bespoke custom development or RPA.

Custom application development is a good option if the requirement is:

Long term requirement
APIs to the application pages are available
The transaction level is high
Business can wait for development to progress through IT development queue

RPA is a good option:

Short / medium term requirement
Application packages may change functionality
The transaction level is low or medium
Business needs a solution quickly and does not want to employ people to perform the work

This is a list of use cases which can be implemented with RPA:

Web site or cloud application extract data and save to Excel
Use data from Excel to populate web application
Copy data from one web application to another web application
Check data value alignment / comparison between web applications
Monitor Email Inbox and save attachments from selected emails
Monitor a folder (Directory) for new documents and process each document
Examine email for subject line and message text to determine “Sentiment” to classify as an “Enquiry”, “Complaint”, Other.
Access a supplier portal to obtain quotes, place orders, and get delivery notes
Access a customer portal to obtain quote requests, submit quotes, obtain purchase orders, and submit invoices
Extract data from invoices and populate accounts payable system
Extract data from invoices for cost allocation to generate “reseller” invoice charges
Create evidence of End to End information from systems to meet auditor requirements
Perform standard helpdesk functions such as password resets
Perform standard helpdesk functions such as close account when an employee leaves
Daily overnight credit checking against public information for current customers
Know Your Customer (KYC) checks that assemble information from specific sources
GDPR / FOI – data subject access requests can draft response by assembling information from known sources
Book couriers from preferred supplier lists, based on availability
Shipment tracking by accessing a logistics portal to monitor the progress of packages to the delivery locations