An investment in RPA promises high returns for businesses in 2020

BUSINESS owners today know that digital transformation must be a priority if they want to survive in 2020.

In undertaking digital transformation, they have been on the lookout for technologies that have the potential to add value to their organizations.

One technology that seems to hold a lot of promise — especially as businesses move into 2020 — is robotic process automation (RPA).

With RPA, a script is configured to capture and interpret how one or more applications process a transaction, triggering responses or communicating with other digital systems.

At its core, RPA allows for the automation of repetitive, high-frequency business operations. It is an exceptional tool and can be leveraged in something as simple as completing expense reports to more complicated tasks that involve organizing and labeling documents.

Within an organization, there are many tasks that do not require human intelligence. By deploying RPA to complete these tasks, enterprises can be free to reorient their workforce and shift their focus on challenging and high-value functions. Employees will also have more time to devote to value-added activities.

Aside from this, RPA is also extremely accurate, and can eliminate issues created by human error. Further, RPAs have been shown to increase employee engagement, thereby increasing business productivity.

However, it must be noted that RPA cannot be implemented as a standalone technology in the automation of a process.

This is because RPA will not complete 100 percent of an assigned task. There will always be exceptions where ‘abnormal’ issues occur, and require a human to attend to it.

Thus, organizations will need to consider building in a process for exception handling. This will enable RPA to handle the ‘easy’ items and redirect abnormal ones for a human to complete.

The reason RPA is so exciting is that it’s easy to implement and frees up employees’ time to complete more complex tasks.

However, RPA is not viable if the exceptions generated outweighs the benefits gained from automation. A process with too many exceptions will not achieve the goal of freeing up resources.

Therefore, organizations thinking of automating must weigh the complexity of a process with how many exceptions it might generate before implementing RPA.

Ultimately, RPA is a technology that businesses these days must invest in. If implemented wisely, a business owner can use the technology to improve performance significantly.

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