
When you first hear about the benefits of robotic process automation (RPA)—boosted productivity, and improved accuracy—it’s not hard to want to jump right in. RPA software helps you handle repetitive, manual tasks to lighten your workload so you can focus on more value-added tasks. You can probably think of many tasks on your to-do list right now that you would like to hand over to software robots.
But the best way to get started with RPA is to pick one focus area to streamline before moving on to other departments or processes in your organization. Once you start seeing results and preaching the benefits of RPA to your coworkers, you’ll be better suited to scale and expand your RPA strategy. We’ve identified six key RPA application areas to pick from to start leveraging an RPA solution in your workplace.
1. IT Services Automation
Whenever you get the pesky password change reminder, it seems like an easy enough task on your end. But behind the scenes, your IT team is responsible for making the change happen—and not just for you, but for your entire organization. Your IT team could be working on more important projects instead of completing these simple tasks over and over again. Enter, RPA software, which lets you automate responses to common requests like password resets. RPA is a solution that can also monitor systems that allow you to receive automatic, real-time notifications of problems, to report on and analyze your IT services. Freeing your IT team to spend more time keeping your systems up and running.
2. Human Resources Automation
Human resources employees should be all about people—recruiting them, training them, and making sure they’re successful at your company. But skilled HR staff often spend their days bogged down in paper processes instead. Software robots can give HR an assist with many of the tasks they have to repeat for every new employee. An RPA solution can automate many of these user provisioning processes, integrating with Active Directory for swift onboarding, offboarding, or account management. You can also scrape data from employment and benefits forms, automatically email managers, and integrate every workflow along the employee lifecycle. Freeing the HR team to do what they do best—work with people.
3. Automated Data Extraction
If you handle a high volume of data, an RPA solution can bridge the gaps between your business applications or databases and make extracting and manipulating data easy. Harness the power of data with bots that extract, manipulate, and utilize data from sources on premise or in the cloud. RPA software can integrate with anywhere you get your data—web browsers, CSV, databases, Microsoft Excel, and even your email applications like Microsoft Exchange or Gmail. Use RPA software to quickly build a workflow that reads a table from a database, summarizes the contents, and writes the data to a second database table, merging it with other data along the way if necessary. Letting you put your focus and expertise on analyzing your data instead of spending time organizing it.
4. Claims Processing Automation
Accuracy and speed are key with claims processing. But claims also can require a high volume of paperwork and complicated, error-prone workflows that slow you down. Let RPA streamline each step in your claims processing workflow—processing forms, validating eligibility, notification, payment, and more. Plus, the accuracy RPA provides virtually eliminates human error. Letting you not only process claims faster, but more accurately.
5. Accounts Payable Automation
Nobody’s happy when payments get delayed. When vendors need payment, the pressure is on you to be efficient and timely. RPA software can automatically process invoices upon arrival–whether in your inbox or from a scanned in paper form—and extract and manipulate the data you need along your workflows. And you can set up custom workflows to manage your organization’s unique accounts payable workflows. When you automate these processes, you increase the accuracy and efficiency of your process, so you make sure everyone gets paid on time.
6. Call Center Automation
Call center agents have one goal—provide a superior customer service experience. To do this, agents need to have as much information available on each customer before the phone call even gets answered. Have customer data in multiple spots? An RPA workflow can quickly access multiple systems—like a CRM or ERP—to pull, analyze, and process order history and other data. And RPA software can automatically insert orders directly into your system so agents don’t have to manually input them. Saving your agents time by getting them the information they need and completing data entry so they can focus on helping customers.
As you begin your RPA software journey, it’s important to have a strategy and RPA roadmap to success in mind. Put your energy into streamlining one area of focus as you begin and spread out to other workflows and departments from there. If you’re ready to see the benefits of an RPA solution for yourself, set up a demo of Automate. Our RPA experts will show you how Automate can help and will be available to answer any questions you might have!
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