8 Ways RPA Tools Can Transform Your Workday

1. Automation Helps End Report Creation Burnout

Spreadsheets and reports. You either love them or hate them. However, they are invaluable and necessary for making informed, strategic decisions at your operations.

Compiling spreadsheets or manually creating reports in your ERP system, your CRM system, your EMR system, or in General Ledgers can take analysts away from analyzing, eat up hours of staff time, and run the risk of human error.

Automate, an RPA tool from the Fortra automation suite, can ease report fatigue by automatically writing reports in a variety of formats. It can also assist by integrating reporting with other actions. With Automate in place you could, for example, set up an automatic workflow to scrape data from email attachments, write the data into an Excel document, and email that document to stakeholders. Boom. Report done.

2. Help HR Focus on People Not Processes with RPA

From recruiting to benefits to training, the human resources department centers on people. Too often, however, HR staff time is spent processing routine paperwork and repetitive onboarding steps. Software robots via RPA can free up HR to truly put the focus back on employees.

For example, an RPA tool can automate the tasks needed for the user provisioning process. Automate can integrate with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory for on- and offboarding or account management, scrape data from numerous forms, automatically email a manager, and much more. User management change requests and user migration can all be automated without the need for customized coding, as workflows can easily be set up with pre-built actions.

3. Web Browser Automation

While the internet is a powerful tool, some of the tasks involved when logging into websites or vendor portals to gather data, such as filling out forms, clicking buttons and downloading files can get quite repetitive, and also prone to human error, especially when uploading to your ERP, CRM, server or other location.

Some organizations try to solve this by writing custom scripts, but this is not a scalable, reliable or cost-effective tactic. Instead, you can incorporate Automate’s web browser automation functionality to integrate web automation into your comprehensive automation strategy without a minute of programming time involved.

4. File Transfers Can Be Speedier with RPA

Large or small, a handful or thousands -- file transfers happen all day, every day at most organizations – and they can bog down your operations if not streamlined and automated.

If your organization needs to move files automatically or have other advanced requirements, such as complicated file names, error handling, and more, automating this process is a must for time-savings. Automating file transfers with an RPA solution allows you to generate a report, compress and encrypt it, and send it on its way at the time and with the workflow you set-up.

Automate supports protocols such as AS2 and FTP and can automatically handle the work of large volumes of FTP activity. The user-friendly interface can be configured to any company network to manage FTP processes, such as reading, editing, and scanning PDFs to extract data, encrypting and compressing files, and moving data between systems.

5. Clean Up Your Email In-box with RPA

If your inboxes are overflowing with emails, an RPA solution can help tame the deluge and more importantly, help employees focus more easily on messages needing personal attention.

Automate’s email functionality features a drag-and-drop interface so IT and business users can quickly and easily automate routine email interactions with no programing required. Repeated processes with inbound and outbound emails like IT service desk requests, order entries, and invoicing can all be set up to be processed automatically.

6. RPA Can Streamline Compliance-Related Tasks

Industries needing to comply with regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, and more can simplify the process for IT staff so they can concentrate on more pressing needs with a robotic process automation tool. RPA tools can be configured to handle processes like automated data base queries, encryption during file transfers to ensure data protection and security regulations are met, and more.

In addition, reports can be set up to be generated in the required formats with timeframes you determine – quarterly, annually, etc. Compliance requirements are often repetitive so naturally lend themselves to being handled by an RPA solution.

7. Collaborate with Ease When RPA is in Place

Microsoft’s SharePoint is a powerful, popular tool for collaborating, but it can also be a bit tricky to navigate for many users and requires constant maintenance and monitoring by IT staff for optimal use.

Microsoft Applications such as Excel, SharePoint, and more benefit from the prebuilt automation building blocks and drag-and-drop interface to improve productivity when working with these applications

Automate with native SharePoint in place can help organizations better integrate SharePoint into workflows across their network. A variety of pre-built SharePoint tasks and a drag-and-drop user interface helps manage this powerful tool’s users, sites, libraries, workflows, and lists.

Here’s a few ways SharePoint processes can be streamlined with automation:

• Save time when uploading or downloading files to SharePoint
• Retrieve and control workflows
• Manage users and groups
• And more!

8. Integrate With Other Applications

To get the most out of your investment in mission-critical applications, you need those applications to be integrated with each other for use across systems and departments.

Growing organizations can count on Automate to deliver scalable integration via a standards-based approached to enterprise application integration. Both legacy data and disparate systems can be brought together on-premise or in a cloud-based environment.