During the last few years, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has grown leaps and bounds. Even amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and economic instability, businesses adopted RPA to allow various departments to pursue their operations without disruption and automate mundane tasks. A recent Gartner report stated that the Global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) revenue is estimated to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, which is a 19.5% increase from 2020. The same study also has shown that RPA’s revenue will continue to grow manifold in 2024. The above data is sufficient proof that RPA is going to be a significant technology trend in the future and may completely transform how businesses function. Even today, everyone in the IT industry is talking about RPA and RPA use cases are applied in every industry. Right from finance to healthcare to insurance, RPA implementation is being considered as a stepping stone to achieving organizational efficiency. This article talks about RPA, its benefits and highlights the top 5 RPA trends that businesses are likely to adopt in 2021 and beyond.
What is RPA?
Robotic Process Automation streamlines operational workflows to make businesses more responsive, flexible, and profitable. By removing mundane tasks from their operations, they can enhance employee engagement and productivity. RPA implementation can rapidly advance digital transformation and automate workflows.
Through RPA services offered by Robotic Process Automation Service Providers, users can create bots that learn and execute business processes. RPA bots can interact with any application or system in the same way as humans and they can operate round the clock with more efficiency, precision and 100% reliability.
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
Enhanced Productivity: RPA transforms employee productivity by accelerating workflows and getting more work done by independently executing tasks.
Improved Accuracy: Automation with RPA is enabling industries like healthcare and finance to achieve 100% accuracy and strict compliance standards. RPA is also ensuring new levels of speed and precision in the accounting sector.
Cost saving and ROI: By regaining time lost in manual administrative tasks, several industries like healthcare have managed to cut costs and boost their ROI.
Cross-platform integration: RPA is platform and application agnostic, so you will not need to update or replace existing systems to implement RPA. Bots enable businesses to seamlessly connect to all software tools and applications irrespective of functionality and department.
Customer Experience : RPA bots help agents interact with the customers by managing the data entry and the communications system contributing to a significant improvement in customer experience.
Top 5 Robotic Process Automation Trends to watch out for
Focus on Intelligent Automation
Robotic Process Automation will be in the spotlight in the coming years along with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. When deployed together, it can greatly benefit strategic marketing, and business performance. Cognitive automation will greatly simplify tasks such as supervision of communication, customized financial advice, customer queries, promotions, and deals. Organizations will realize the role of RPA and AI in boosting business revenue and staying competitive in their industry.
RPA adoption will extend beyond IT and Finance
Finance, insurance, and banking sectors were early adopters of RPA due to the presence of a huge volume of repetitive tasks. Similarly, the myth that RPA can work only with IT will begin to lose ground. As the rate of RPA adoption increases, more companies are beginning to realize its benefits across departments and processes. Sectors like HR, customer experience, manufacturing and other industries will embrace and implement RPA to meet their strategic business objectives.
Elimination of Paperwork
RPA implementation will save organizations millions of man-hours in the coming years. RPA can relieve employees from monotonous and time-consuming tasks to enable them to focus their energy on key business processes. It is predicted that all rule-based activities may not require human intervention and paperwork may be eliminated. RPA trends are moving towards intelligent bots extracting, and processing data online. These workforce bots may phase out invoices, client forms and everything that is done in office. The pre-programmed bots will also ensure higher productivity for paper-related activities.
RPA Deployment in Cloud
Be it RPA in Healthcare, Banking, or Insurance, the cloud is the need of the hour. Cloud deployment ensures that there are enough repositories to store the massive amount of data involved in RPA processes. Through cloud deployment, companies can process data instantly by building a virtual RPA infrastructure and deploying bots. In fact, cloud technology itself may drive bots to perform multiple functions with the same data. Vendors may offer cloud bots that can reduce the set up and infrastructure costs for businesses.
Blending of Manual and Digital Efforts
With the redundant tasks taken over by robots, certain tasks will still require human intelligence. While some businesses will look at adopting RPA to completely automate business processes, most of them will embrace a more hybrid strategy going forward. Humans and robots will work in sync to accomplish the entrusted tasks. Another anticipated future RPA trend is that it will enhance automation of many state-of-the-art technologies such as Advanced Data processing, Blockchain, Optical Character Recognition etc.
The Final Word
Robotic Process Automation trends are only multiplying, and RPA adoption is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. RPA will no longer remain an option but will become a necessity for modern enterprises to achieve their goals. After analyzing the trends, businesses can leverage the services of Robotic Process Automation service providers to automate business processes.
