Anton Petkov

6 Robotic process automation examples for scaling businesses

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Scaling up your business requires selecting the right settings for your company’s digital workflows. Scaling depends on adapting quickly and synchronizing within a dynamic environment. However, if not planned well for the long term, you may, at some point, get overwhelmed, or lost, failing to achieve your business goals. By scaling, you want to stimulate sustainable growth as much as possible. Do you wish to scale your business easier? If the answer is yes, then this article is exactly for you.

Why use RPA for scaling your business?

The accelerating development of Robotic Process Automation has a huge potential to enable businesses to scale organically and sustainably. Each startup aims to reach the point where revenue is increasing without substantial growth in resources. As such, scaling comes as a result of the right planning and improved process workflows. However, the truth is that expansion contains risks.

 

Acquiring a bigger market share is essential, but it could also become a threat if it happens too fast at a given point. That is why organizations have to be prepared to avoid overloads and use technology to leverage risk. RPA is becoming widespread amongst scaling businesses because of the numerous opportunities for shifting rule-based mundane tasks from humans to digital workers. This opens up a growing room for team members to perform more creative activities, contributing to the company’s growth strategy.

In a previous article, we explained what the benefits of RPA are. However, in a nutshell, Robotic Process Automation is well-known for improving overall business efficiency across industries. It brings higher quality and consistency, saving time and money. It is also recognized as a powerful asset for increasing productivity among team members. This translates directly into scalable growth and higher profits for your company.

According to analyses performed by Deloitte, “only a tiny minority (3 percent) of progressive leaders have reached any form of scale with more than 50 robots in service. Organizations must make the right strategic choices—laying the right foundation to enable a “premium” digital workforce to support their drive for competitive advantage.” It is further suggested that “given the relative immaturity of the automation market, it is taking time for large organizations, in particular, to learn about and adopt RPA at scale.” This demonstrates the advantage startups have to make RPA a crucial part of their scale-up strategy as this would enable them to compete for market share with far larger but digitally immature organizations.

Top 6 RPA examples for scaling businesses:

We divided our list of RPA examples into six major sections based on the key business functions where software robots can help the most with the growth of your business. We hope this list will give you a useful overview of the practical applications of RPA to help you scale your business. Now let’s dive in.

You don’t have time to read the whole article right now? Download a free one-page infographic that summarizes the key details you need to know about RPA and its benefits and applications for scaling businesses. Download it here.

1. Customer Support & Client Onboarding

Common, yet, outstanding examples of RPA are the auto-responding to queries and auto-sending of notifications which are both essential for an effective customer support function. Nowadays, users require quick answers to their questions or instant help with problems that they face. A great part of these requests can be handled by RPA digital agents in a routine, standardized manner. This saves valuable resources for companies and improves customer satisfaction. For instance, Facebook has already automated most of its customer support. As a result, the human workload has substantially decreased, while customer satisfaction has gone up.

 

New client onboarding and new account openings are also processes easily handled by a robot. In addition, more and more often, a lot of scaling businesses delegate to software robots call center operations, including help desk services. In fact, RPA can take care of most of the common queries and repetitive issues. Robots effortlessly help agents by displaying a dashboard with suggested solutions and summarizing relevant information.

2. Accounting & Admin

Most administrative tasks like generating, preparing, and processing documents must be automated in each growing business today. For example, handling invoices is a fundamental task in accounting. It is also one of the most time-consuming processes that companies of all sizes have to tackle. The good news is that today digital workers can execute the entire process instead of humans, with zero interruptions and mistakes. 


Creating and delivering invoices, like most rule-based activities, can be automated by linking accounting and ERP systems. By extracting data from submitted receipts robots can even handle the expense management process and generate expense reports. Essentially, all the data entry and manual work involved can be done by robots to make processes automated, paperless, and efficient.

3. Finance Operations

If deployed strategically within the finance function, robots are able to perform not only simple individual tasks but even finance sub-functions such as procurement and tax compliance. Surveys show that one robot can be up to 30 times more productive than a full-time working human. The truth is that the evolution of RPA in finance has reached the stage of full automation. This means that the opportunities for a scalable finance function range from simple everyday processes, such as bank reconciliations, to complex operations such as financial analysis and forecasting.

Common RPA use cases within finance:

  • Transaction processing - approval, due diligence, and onboarding processes;
  • Payroll operations - including changes in records, attendance management, time entry validations, resignation, and deductions;
  • Bank statement reconciliation - extracting data from bank statements and comparing it to the company’s records;
  • Issuing refunds - prompt refunds to customers requesting refunds;

Some enterprises are going a step further by automating requests for approval and as a result, are reducing their processing time by 75%. Banks, for example, automate their commercial lending processes by completing standardized data forms, which help them to accelerate new account opening and new client onboarding.

4. Human Resource Operations

RPA has significant use cases for scaling the human resource function. Among the operations that a digital workforce can perform instead of humans are:
  • Candidate sourcing - pulling data from job search platforms, auto-reviewing applications, aggregating resumes, auto-scheduling meetings, taking notes from interviews;
  • Hiring - comparing candidate data, assessing results, preparing paperwork such as HR contracts and agreements;
  • Onboarding employees - ensuring compliance with Policy & Procedures by auto-sending relevant information like Welcome Materials, Company Guidelines, or Training Resources;

5. Sales Operations

One of the most fundamental challenges during the scaling phase is how to speed up the sales cycle with efficiency and precision. Speed is important but so is the accuracy of the pricing proposals, the sales contracts, the timely notifications, and follow-ups. These are all areas that require significant attention to detail in order to perform these routine administrative operations diligently and correctly. Software robots come in to support the sales process by handling numerous administrative tasks.

 

Common processes that should be automated within scaling businesses include:

  • Preparation and delivery of accurate sale quotes;
  • Checks of supplier portals to confirm availability and price;
  • Preparation and updates of pricing models based on a pre-configured logic;
  • Extraction of data from supplier portals and inserting it into pricing models;
  • Preparation of sales contracts;
  • Update of CRM systems;
  • Interaction with ERP systems;

6. Compliance & Data-Related Operations

Statistics show that implementing RPA improves compliance accuracy by 93%. In the dynamic business environment, compliance is vital for each scaling business. For example, a change in tax or regulatory conditions would require numerous validations of records.

 

Here’s a list of data-related RPA use cases ensuring better compliance for scaling businesses:

  • Check for completeness;
  • Data entry from files to ERP;
  • Read and process paper forms, and transfer them into digital forms;
  • Annual tax return preparation;
  • Filling in and submitting of compliance forms & returns;
  • Check validity of VAT numbers via API;
  • Copy and move data between systems;
  • Generation of reports;
  • Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks;

Download a free one-page infographic that summarizes the key details you need to know about RPA and its benefits and applications for scaling businesses. Download it here.

Conclusion

Technological advances have made intelligent automation possible across a wide spectrum of manual processes. Scaling companies should strategize on how to optimize operations to meet business and investor goals and stay on track. By implementing RPA, you can build scalable processes and optimize business resources to make sure budgets last longer and human capacity is invested in value-adding business functions.

However, when it comes to adopting RPA for scaling, insecurities still prevail in most companies. That is why RPA continues to be overlooked despite its fundamental benefits. So, it is crucially important that decision-makers continuously dedicate time to identifying processes within their business that could and should be automated to achieve a scalable future.

At Capto, we believe automation should be implemented gradually and strategically. Our team has automated many processes already and we’d happily suggest RPA solutions that are flexible and tailored to your company’s scale-up needs. If you are looking to scale your business, meet investor goals, and make your resources last longer, then have a chat with us. We are here to help you leverage automation to drastically save time & resources and grow with scalable processes.

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Sources & references:

 

1. Deloitte. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/operations/articles/global-robotic-process-automation-report.html

2. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marksettle/2020/10/20/the-proper-path-to-achieving–automation-at-scale/?sh=538509922a4a
3. Bernard Marr. https://bernardmarr.com/10-amazing-examples-of-robotic-process-automation-in-practice/
4. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/finance/insights/robotics-in-finance
5. AI Multiple. https://research.aimultiple.com/robotic-process-automation-use-cases/

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What are the benefits of robotic process automation?

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In the digital world of today being adaptable is a vital requirement for each company. The technological advance creates a dynamic environment for both users and software service providers. As such, you constantly have to follow up with the innovations and expand your knowledge to keep on track. Nowadays, it is crucial to understand that one of the major prerequisites for business success is automation. This article will explain in a friendly language the robotic process automation benefits and how your business can take advantage of this modern technology. But first, let’s clarify two fundamental terms:

What is a software robot?

A robot is a machine capable of sensing and interacting with its environment. It’s an automatically operated machine that replaces human effort. However, in this article, we will not talk about physical robots, but we will use the word “robot” to refer to software robots, or “bots”. Software robots are nothing more than pieces of code. They are simple or complex computer programs designed to perform specific actions, such as automating repetitive tasks or simulating human users, among others. Software robotics is gaining popularity in business today, increasing the use of bot programs to automate computer tasks normally performed by people.

What is robotic process automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation based on software robots (digital workers). RPA re-creates the way humans interact with software to perform high-volume, repeatable tasks. Its ability to copy the way humans perform computer-based processes has contributed to its popularity compared with automation tools such as application programming interfaces (APIs).

 

RPA uses software agents (bots) to carry out routine clerical tasks without human assistance. It is useful for automating business processes that are rules-based and repetitive. RPA bots can follow a workflow that encompasses multiple steps across multiple applications. However, unlike traditional automation projects that require extensive developer help, RPA projects simply use an organization’s existing applications which makes it far more accessible, even by small and midsize enterprises. 

 

Additionally, when combined with AI and machine learning, RPA can capture more context from the content it is processing, extract entities like names, invoice details, or addresses, and identify data from images, such as automatically estimating accident damage in an insurance claim picture. This can greatly reduce costs and increase efficiency by speeding things up and significantly minimizing errors. In other words, this means delegating repeating processes within your workflows to RPA bots.

For example, an RPA bot can be used to:

  • Complete & Receive forms;
  • Check for completeness;
  • Use external information or proprietary databases to look up missing information;
  • Enter missing data;
  • Copy data between applications or workflows as required;
  • Forward completed, validated forms to its next destination;
  • Calculate and complete numerous tasks;
Now let’s take a look at the advantages of using RPA in business and its usage in different industries.

What is RPA used for?

Robotic process automation helps businesses overcome data challenges and inefficiencies by using the power of modern computer programs, thus, focusing on constant and sustainable growth. It is designed to help primarily with office-type functions that often require the ability to do several types of tasks in a specific order. Using RPA tools, a company can configure a robot to capture and interpret applications in order to process a transaction, manipulate data, trigger responses, and communicate with other digital systems.

 

As such, RPA provides organizations with the ability to adapt and respond quickly. What’s more, is that RPA software bots can also use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to free up human employees and allow them to concentrate on more complicated tasks rather than routine work.

 

For example, a large commercial bank may use 100 software bots to run 15 processes that handle over 1.5 million requests in one year. Recently, the implementation of RPA in business enterprises has shown dramatic cost savings when compared to traditional non-RPA solutions.

RPA is used in most industries, particularly those that include repetitive tasks such as manufacturing, legal, insurance, banking, finance, accounting, healthcare, human resources, and telecommunications. Indeed, RPA is widely used for procure-to-pay, mortgage and lending processes, customer service and CRM, eCommerce merchandising operations, and data extraction processes, among others. 


Before moving on to the core topic, let’s take a glimpse at the infographic below, showing some examples of RPA applications within different industries.

robotic process automation benefits

What are the robotic process automation benefits

1. Boosted efficiency

One of the key factors for the successful development and scaling of a business is the coefficient of efficiency. Every day you are in a situation in which you compete with yourself and your competitors to be more efficient. Scaling could indeed be a great threat to a growing business unless there are sufficient process efficiencies in place. It goes without saying that if your processes are much more efficient than your competitors’, this gives you a significant competitive advantage. This is where the implementation of RPA  can be of significant importance as it fundamentally streamlines processes and speeds up the execution of manual tasks to substantially improve business efficiency.

2. Increased innovation

Repeated manual work is a genuine obstacle to innovation. It is, without a doubt, the routine that any person inside your organization would find uninspiring and quite dull. Repeated manual work is not only boring by nature. It is often a waste of energy and time for us humans who thrive on creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. Once eliminated, this valuable time and energy could be invested into solving problems, and developing new concepts and innovations. By optimizing processes,people can focus on the creative activities at work which has a significant direct impact on the degree of business innovation. RPA plays a major part in facilitating this positive change.

3. Increased responsiveness

The success of a company always depends on its ability to get the job done on time. Robotic process automation has completely revolutionized the way businesses work. The truth is that nowadays we are blessed to have technology so advanced that companies are able to implement RPA to automate low-value mundane tasks while freeing their employees to focus on value-added activities for their business. This allows businesses to respond quickly to market fluctuations, deliver customer service and support with speed and accuracy, and increase the overall responsiveness of the business.

4. Flawless execution

By letting robots do the “mindless” work you guarantee flawless execution of all repetitive tasks and manual processes. This improves the performance of your company and reduces the chances of errors, or delays. Not only that, but it can also have a direct positive impact on your business agility, and profitability. 

5. Improved customer experience

The most important factor for increasing customer retention is to make sure they feel satisfied with their experience with your business. This can be achieved by better and more personal communication at each phase of the customer journey. RPA helps at all stages of the customer journey and improves the overall experience by letting you serve your clients more quickly, flexibly, and responsively. The final results are faster delivery, improved quality of service, and more efficient support.

6. Happier & more productive team

Last but not least, RPA helps to keep your employees happy and much more productive at work. According to surveys, more than 70% of employees state that they use one extra day a week saved through automation to execute activities that add true value to their organizations. What’s more, is that almost 80% of them say they focus on the more creative aspects of their work which increases overall motivation and staff happiness. This is a clear positive sign that RPA reduces the pressure and prevents staff from burning out.

RPA provides even more significant benefits to your business. Here are some more examples of all you can achieve thanks to RPA:

  • Invest more resources in core business operations;
  • Stimulate employees to learn and take up more strategic functions;
  • Generate major cost savings by automating mundane day-to-day functions;
  • Enhance resilience to match workload peaks and respond to huge demand spikes:
  • Reach accuracy goals with reliable consistency;
  • Improve business data security;
    • Seize opportunities for scale;
RPA is all about automating repetitive and monotonous tasks so that you and your employees can divert your complete attention towards the more fundamental ones.
Robotic process automation empowers humans to play at their core strengths by giving them the time to focus on the most valuable business activities and projects. This makes organizations more profitable, flexible, and adaptable. Not only that, but RPA is also reported to increase employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity by removing mundane tasks from the day-to-day agendas. It truly is an investment that delivers rapid and multi-dimensional ROI.

Conclusion:

The benefits of RPA make it clear that this technology has an essential role in business. As discussed above, the implementation of RPA improves the efficiency, reliability, and speed of your business thanks to the automation of tasks and processes previously performed by humans. It’s already transforming businesses around the world, giving them the competitive advantage they need to get ahead in their sector. And now it’s your time.

How can you take advantage of RPA?

The good news is there is no need to reinvent the wheel. We are here to help. Our team is dedicated to providing holistic RPA business solutions to companies. Each day we work with clients from all over the world to scale and implement RPA. They’ve already become convinced of the power of automation and included it in their strategies for long-term success. You can also take advantage of our expertise and start your RPA journey by booking a free consultation slot with one of our experts. Brainstorm with us to figure out which processes, functions, and departments within your business structure can and should be automated. We’d love to help you benefit from robotic processes automation in the era of digital transformation.
Sources & references:

1. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/robotic-process-automation-rpa.asp/

2. TechTarget. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/RPA/

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation/

4. GeeksforGeeks. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence-in-robotics/

5. Techopedia. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/32099/automation/

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