What can RPA do for you?

The question “What can RPA do for you?” comes up a lot when you say that you implement software robots for RPA solutions.

Sometimes effectively the same question is asked as “Who is RPA for?”

These are natural questions as the general awareness about software robots and the potential usage of RPA is new for many organisations outside of the Global corporations.

The simple answer is that software robots enable a business to get better value from their investment in staff – that deals with the “What”.

For every business that have staff working on computers in an office, they could benefit from software robots delivering automation to improve the value from the staff – that answers the “Who”.

The software robots are best used where the computer activities are:

• Repetitive
• Prone to error
• Rules based
• Involve digital data
• Time critical
• Suffer from seasonal peaks

Software robots provide generic capabilities which is why the “Who is RPA for” has such a broad answer.

What RPA can do is automate the computer activities which removes “Human Errors”, delivers increased “Speed of processing” as robots typically work at 10 times the rate of a person and increases “Processing Capacity” as software robots can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week;  Together these drive down operating costs and increase both productivity as well as quality.

Once a process has been automated, nobody ever wants to go back to manual processing. Who would want to return to writing documents on a type writer?

The opportunities for automation using software robots to create Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions will vary by company. With software robots able to work with Office products (e.g. Outlook, Excel, Word, PDF), desktop and cloud applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle, through to green screen mainframes and AS/4000, the opportunities are broad. The answer to “Who is RPA for?” is usually every business.

Please see our list of potential “Use Cases”, some of which might be applicable to your organisation.