RPA Use Cases/Applications

There are several examples of Robotic Process Automation in our day to day tasks. In the present time, many multinational companies are using this technology to automate their day to day tasks.

By implementing RPA, these companies are getting accurate, reliable, and consistent outputs with high productivity rates.

One of the most important tasks in the Robotic Process Automation program is the right selection of business processes and activities. It ensures positive results by automating the tasks that are repetitive and rule-based.

RPA Use Cases

The following list is categorized into five different sections that display the RPA use cases:

1. Common business processes and activities
2. Activities in commercial functions
   • Sales
   • Customer Relationship Management
3. Activities in support functions
   • Tech Support
   • Technology
   • Finance
   • HR
   • Operations
   • Procurement
4. Industry-specific activities
   • Banking
   • Insurance
   • Telecom
   • Retail
5. Robotic Process applications for personal use such as digital assistants

RPA Applications

There are several applications of RPA, but here, we are listing some of the common application areas:

Quote-to-Cash

It is considered as an important business process, which is responsible for increasing revenue for any organization. Organizations are usually dependant on selling. If there is any issue in the operations side of selling, then it can lead to customer's complaints.

Sometimes, organizations end up selling at reduced prices due to clerical errors. Automating such sales processes reduces errors and provides fast service to the customers.

Procure-to-Pay

It is the process that includes the extraction of invoices and payment data from various networks such as banks, vendors, logistics companies, etc. These networks usually do not provide easy integration methods. They generally involve manual labor to complete the tasks, which can be replaced by the RPA bots. It is the best way to fill integration gaps with a fully automated procure-to-pay.

Customer Onboarding

Most of the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) organizations are following a customer onboarding process. They must maintain good relations with their customers so that customers start using their products. Using cognitive automation and OCR (Optical Character Reader), most of the customer onboarding tasks can be easily done. It can be applied even in companies that rely on legacy systems, which will help in improving the customer experience.

Employee Onboarding

The process of setting up and onboarding new employees is labor-intensive and time-taking for HR and IT analysts. It includes a series of tasks such as creating new accounts, email addresses, access rights, etc. Because of the rule-based and repetitive nature of employee onboard activities, it can be automated to apply pre-defined workflow once the new user account is created. RPA bots can be assigned to send notifications and documents via email to new employees.

Data Migration and Data Entry

Most companies are still using legacy systems to perform critical functions. A legacy billing system is an example of such systems. It needs to interact with other systems that may not have the capability to get required data from APIs. In such cases, employees manually perform tasks to migrate the data using formats like CSV. With the implementation of RPA, manual labor, and unexpected clerical errors, can be reduced to the minimum level. Organizations can also automate entire workflows of data entries, which can maximize productivity by reducing the time.

Data Validation

RPA is more suitable than any other tools to perform data validation tasks such as checking the accuracy and quality of source data before using, importing, or processing the data. The primary aim is to create data that is consistent, accurate, and complete, so there will not be any data loss and errors during a transfer.

Extracting Data from PDFs, Scanned Documents and other Formats

With technologies like Screen Scraping, OCR, and basic pattern recognition, data can be easily extracted from different formats, which will help to reduce the requirement of inputting the data manually.

Periodic Report Preparation

In every business, employees need to prepare regular reports to inform managers about their work and progress. Preparing such reports and sending them to the managers may distract employees. RPA solutions can be applied to auto-generate reports, analyze their contents, and further email them to relevant managers.

Generating Mass Emails

If there is a need for sending mass emails frequently, then RPA can be a great option to automate the process.

Creating and Developing Invoices

Since automation is faster than manual processes, customers will get the invoices earlier, including earlier payments and improved cash-flow. The process of generating invoices and sending it to the customers can also be automated.

Price Comparison

With the implementation of RPA, it is possible to keep track of the fluctuating prices. Software bots can easily create a summary of prices and also extract data for the best pricing.