Historically, a major number of large organizations have made investments in some variant of automation. They’re looking towards automation as a method to revolutionize business operations. Gartner states that the international robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue is forecasted to attain $1.89 billion this year.  

RPA is the leveraging of software in the automation of high volume and tedious activities that were prior needed to be performed by a human agent. RPA facilitates the configuration of a bot or digital staff to capture and go about interpreting activities on current applications like processing transactions, manipulating or transforming information, triggering reactions and responses, and integration with other digital frameworks. The most typical use case is utilizing RPA to facilitate staff members to concentrate on higher value tasks by outsourcing monotonous work from human employees to digital workers. 

The best candidates that can be automated leveraging RPA are human tasks that are monotonous, large-volumes, rules-based, or have a susceptibility to human error. RPA’s primary value add is to free up the human labour force from carrying out tedious, highly repetitious, and data-heavy activities, giving them the time to concentrate on more dynamic, higher value activities. 

RPA robots can emulate a user’s actions, minimize human error, and drive efficiencies. The software is also somewhat low-code, have the outcome of quick times to market.  

Why is RPA adoption appreciating? 

COVID-19 has been a blessing in disguise for automation, it has enhanced the need and justification for automation. Over the previous several years, businesses were required to carry out digital transformation strategies to pivot to remote work, enhance productivity, and client experiences, and develop new products, services or communication channels. RPA software is playing a vital part in achieving this by automation of end-to-end transactional process that prior need human beings to execute. It is also hastening the capability of integrating with intelligent automation capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. 

What are the advantages of RPA? 

Enterprises that pick up RPA software are reaping advantages from enhancements in efficiency and productivity by minimizing monotonous and tedious human intervention inside of their operations. There is also considerable impact to staff retention and reduction in the requirement to employ extra resources as a reaction to demand. In a majority of scenarios, we’re also observing a reduction in the requirement for tedious new employee training. Extra advantages consist of: 

• Improved staff experience and engagement 
• Enhanced security and compliance 
• Better quality services 
• Enhanced agility and minimized time in implementing 

• Minimized expenditure 
• Enhanced data analytics and reporting 

What advantages will my business obtain from RPA implementation? 

RPA furnishes the avenue to go about automating human activities that monotonous, large in volumes, rules-based, and are susceptible to human error. The following traits indicate that you might be the best fit for RPA. 

• Data queries 

• Calculations 
• Data entry 
• Data Transfer to/from legacy systems 
• System integration to applications that don’t have an open way of integrating 
• The requirement for compliance audit capabilities 

• Activities that consist of sensitive data 
• Activities that require to be finished swiftly and/or the requirement to account for SLAs 

2021 – Trending in RPA 

With RPA experiencing ongoing momentum and proliferation in the market, there are various trends to observe: 

• Next level business workflows developed on RPA: RPA is catching up speed through the automation of monotonous, tedious activities swiftly and in a simple fashion. Enterprises are utilizing RPA and using it in conjunction with supplementary technologies like process orchestration and document intelligence in order to go about automating activities. 

• Prioritization of manual workflows: This facilitates enterprises to continually move quicker and innovate. RPA can have massive time-savings across the organization, enabling the concentration to be on more dynamic, valuable, high-impact activities or processes that are propelling the organization forwards. 
• Interconnected ecosystems: Integration of smart automation platforms are enabling digital transformation. Enterprises are capable of taking their cause one stage further and develop ecosystems of technologies, apps, and services to provide their teams accessibility to a network of services, pre-built connectors, solutions, and templates. 
• Citizen devs: Officially termed “non-tech users that develop simple automations for themselves and their work partners. Citizen developers have a critical part in assisting scale technologies within enterprises. They’re not really into coding or development, but rather identify ways to go about automating their everyday activities and processes. Business leadership and IT are required to leverage these persons so they can revolutionize business-critical workflows. 
• Artificial intelligence. Natural language processing (NLP), Machine learning (ML), intelligent optical character recognition (OCR) and image recognition integrated in smart automation platforms are giving power to citizen developers to accomplish digital workflow transformation to increase productivity levels and quicken up work throughout organizations. 

What lies beyond RPA? 

On the present buzzwords in the automation domain is “hyper automation”, which is a more intelligence, quicker, and more advanced variant of RPA. By harnessing ML, AI, and current RPA trends and technologies, hyper automation facilitates enterprises to seamlessly undertake processing of massive amounts of information in order to go about optimizing business processes across the board. 

Hyper automation is critical to the realization of value, and it automates cumulative processes like integration. DevOps, administration, monitoring, enhancing productivity levels and efficiency, and also for the automation of end-to-end workflows.