Industrial Application of Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of software and technology with the use of artificial intelligence to carry out repetitive tasks rapidly, determinedly, and perfectly. RPA has been a great development in many industries at present as large and small scale industries that perform a lot of tedious tasks use it to simplify business processes.

When the technology was first presented, it was not completely accepted by all the industries, but now Robotic Process Automation is rapidly gaining popularity. It has become one of the most intensive technologies in the current era. Now the industries can rely completely on RPA to complete their business process with greater efficiency, at a larger scale, error-free and at a lower cost than having a human employee.

In sectors like insurance, finance, logistics, retail, banking where companies often process large numbers of operations, RPA software can be used as a virtual economical hand to tedious and ordinary tasks. RPA can enable these productions to meet safety and data excellence needs, whilst refining functioning efficiency.

RPA digitizes high-volume, costly and faulty manual processes. Businesses across several segments are now using RPA to reduce functioning costs, reducing human mistakes and related expenditures. According to the NASSCOM, domestic businesses can cut costs by up to 65% through RPA. RPA Software work round the clock through web computerization, thus maximizing efficacy. It not only performs a task autonomously but also self-modifies and learns from the feedback from its environment.

RPA handles huge volume of daily work at high speed which is otherwise strenuous and boring if done manually. Key analytics of RPA can gather data, find errors and loopholes and account them with great speed thus ensuring quicker and smoother functioning of business processes. Businesses across sectors are simplifying workflow using RPA to reduce time and expenses while ensuring maximum accuracy.

Common RPA Applications Include:

Market Overview-Rapid Growth

In 2017, RPA started gaining a lot of traction and since then its advent into the business world has been steady because its valuable benefits offer a fast ROI. According to a Forrester report, the RPA market which was only $250 million in 2016, will grow to $2.9 billion in 2021. As per Gartner, Global RPA Software spending is expected to reach $2.4 billion in 2022. Also, by the end of the year 2022, 80% of the large and very large organizations will have deployed RPA in any form.

Recent Trends in RPA

RPA will evolve into Smart Process Automation

As RPA continues to integrate with digital transformation technologies, it will evolve into Smart Process Automation (SPA) to support smarter business process, intelligent data gathering and smarter decision-making.

Merging with AI and ML

RPA has already started merging with intelligent technologies like AI, ML and cognitive computing to support functions like staffing, business analytics and decision-making, general accounting and many other use cases. This integration will ring in a new era of smart automation and data analysis driven by a powerful combination of automation and intelligent technologies.

RPA in Cloud

There’s no doubt that RPA solutions will soon move to the cloud because organizations will want to minimize dependencies on the IT team as well as benefit from the potential cost savings determined by the shared infrastructure that cloud promises.

RPA Verticalization

Service vendors are already looking at verticalizing RPA implementations for different industries to offer specific benefits to each vertical, and thus to build their own competitive advantage. We can expect to see pre-built bots and frameworks to speed up software bot implementation.

RPA Will Play a Larger Role in Big Data and IoT

RPA will refine the entire process of big data analysis as it can monitor and record their steps at the time of execution. It will also play a key role in IoT by enhancing data management and reforming the data processes. The RPA bots can analyze the data and disclose the time required to process the data as well as the number of automation actions remaining at the end.

Risk Intelligence in RPA

Risk Intelligence RPA (RI RPA) leverages RPA technology within a risk-based intelligent framework. This solution works to optimize the business process and eliminates the need to manually analyze the data in the prospect of problem-solving. We can expect that more and more enterprises will like to adopt this solution.

Divya Madaan, Associate Director, Head of Testing Services (India), Application Development, Sun Life Asia Service Centre India (ASCI)

Wider Use of RPA in Mainstream

As of today, few organizations are using RPA in the mainstream with security and privacy being the primary concern and the impact of robotics on their business. But this will change very soon and we will see more mainstream deployment of RPA.

Conclusion

RPA adoption, according to a GrandView Research report, helps enterprise realign their resources to focus more on customers, growth and strategies. As per the report, the global RPA market size was USD 357.5 Million in 2017 and its growth is projected at a CAGR of 31.1% between 2018-2025. As enterprises continue to see the benefits of RPA and how it optimizes business processes and facilitates better services, the opportunities it brings for the reorganization of the administrative processes the RPA market is expected to expand even faster. We can expect more organizations to invest in RPA to automate processes to streamline their business. By combining with AI and other technologies, RPA itself will evolve and will be able to do much more than it can do today.