Why are businesses so excited about robotic process automation?
Hi, everyone. My name is Carolyn Rogers.
I'm a product manager for business automation at IBM.
Today, I want to give you four reasons why businesses find RPA so compelling.
But first, let's talk about what is it?
What is the problem that we're trying to solve?
And I want you to think about all the times that you spend
doing repetitive tasks on a computer,
whether that's copying and pasting information from Excel files into an application,
or filling out forms, or moving files between folders.
And now think about all of the departments full of smart people all around the world
doing those kinds of repetitive tasks.
That's time and energy that they could be spending on more business-critical work,
and it's also demotivating to have to do all those repetitive tasks day in and day out.
So that's what we're trying to solve with RPA.
The first reason robotic process automation is really compelling
is because of the way that it works,
it works by emulating human clicks and keystrokes on an application user interface,
and that really makes it a bit of a copycat.
But because of that, the possibilities are really endless. It can then interact with a user
interface the same way that a human can, which makes it really flexible. So that brings me to my
second reason why RPA is so compelling is because it's a flexible tool, it really has broad benefits
across different departments and places in your organization. So consider customer service.
You might be updating account information processing customer requests, consider financial
departments that are dealing with receivables, payables, calculations, generating reports.
Think about HR. You're dealing with on-boarding, off-boarding, payroll or supply chain.
Monitoring your inventory, for example. Now, what do all these processes have in common?
Well, they're often routine, meaning they're happening in the same way at the same time
or on a predefined set of triggers with the same applications, et cetera. They're are also
rules based. So you have a predefined set of inputs and outputs that gives a really clear
set of instructions to the bot. And finally, they're dealing really with structured data.
So dates, names, dollar amounts, these are the types of information that we're manipulating
and working on across applications and in these documents. So with RPA we can automate these
really highly manual error prone processes broadly across the business. But not only does have broad
applicability, but it's also highly adaptable. So with RPA, you can adapt and grow in complexity as
your needs grow. So let's give an example, let's say you're in a procurement department
and you are processing invoices, they're coming in several during the week and you've got a bot
that is automatically taking these invoices and uploading them to a central folder. That's great.
Now you're able to also use a bot to monitor that folder. And periodically you're extracting
specific information, let's say dollar amounts or names, dates. And you've got to input that into
a management system that you're using, maybe it's SAP, and the bot can extract specific information,
interpret it the correct way, and put it in the correct fields for you. And then finally, let's
say that every so often, maybe for specific types of invoices, you need to email a report, email
the invoice to a department for further approval and review. You can have a bot do that as well.
Now, this looks like a fairly simple process, but it actually adds up to a lot of manual labor over
time, that can be done much more quickly and with less error with RPA. And in fact, in a real life
example, we had a client that was able to reduce their invoice processing time from one week down
to one day using RPA. And you can expand the scope of this process and increase the complexity
by adding more context. And what I mean by that is adding capabilities like optical character
recognition or intelligent document processing, meaning it enables you to extract data from
from paper documents, bring it in, classify that information and use it in your process.
You can also use business decision engines which allow you to tell your RPA bot what to do and
when to do it. So, for example, auto-approving a loan or rejecting a loan or incorporating AI
and natural language processing and being able to, say, trigger a bot from a chat interface in
your natural working environment. So all of these capabilities together, the combination of things,
puts you on the path to intelligent business automation, sometimes called hyper automation.
So this brings me to the final and maybe most compelling reason for RPA, which is the fast ROI.
So RPA is fairly simple and low cost to implement, and the results are apparent so quickly. So we've
had clients implement thousands of tasks per day, reduce processing times by 60 percent or more,
and generate millions of dollars in business value every year. But not only that, but you
end up with employees who are happier and more satisfied because they're able to do higher value
tasks like talk to customers. And that means you have customers who are happier. Because they're
being served more quickly and efficiently and you also can gain an edge against your competition.
Because you're operating with more speed, efficiency and less error and reduced costs.
So, to summarize the reasons why RPA is so compelling, it starts with the way that it works
because it's a copycat of human clicks and keystrokes. It's a very powerful and generalized tool that provides
broad benefit across various areas of the business. It also means it's highly adaptable
and you can also grow it in scope and complexity with added capabilities as you need. And finally,
you can implement it fairly quickly and at low cost, which means you have a fast ROI.
So, thank you so much for watching and I hope you continue your learning journey with RPA.