Digital Transformation with RPA: Driving effective business change. Key Technologies for Digital Transformation: From RPA to the Cloud explores how the first RPA marks the beginning of digital transformation (Industry 4.0, DT, DX, digital transformation). Learn real-world applications and their impact on improving enterprise efficiency and transforming business processes.
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RPA: Immediate impact and high accessibility
He talked about adopting digital tools as the first step to sustainable DX. He went on to talk about changing the way employees work and experiencing a digital culture. However, it takes time for employees to adapt to these tools and turn them into productive know-how. So, is there a way to start DX with a shorter learning curve and immediate impact?
There is. Robotic process automation (RPA) has gotten a lot of attention lately. RPA is when a robot, or software robot on a computer, takes over the repetitive tasks that humans do with computers. A software robot is an automated program that runs on software rather than a physical robot. From simple, repetitive tasks like pulling information from a web page and saving it to Excel, to more complex business processes like filling out certain forms within a company and creating expense invoices. All of these can be automated with RPA.
Real-world use cases for RPA
For example, if you want to send a courier, you have to manually enter the names and addresses organized in Excel into the courier service’s site. If you have 100 cases, it’s not a big deal, but if you have to enter 10,000 courier data, you have to copy and paste 10,000 times to fulfill orders.
If you don’t have automation between systems, even simple repetitive tasks can take a lot of time and increase the likelihood of manual errors. Another example is if you have someone who is responsible for checking and reporting on real estate prices at a specific address on a daily basis. Every day when they arrive at work, they check the prices and enter them into a report (or email).
But what if this is not just one address, but 1,000 addresses every day? This person would probably be stuck doing this and not doing anything else. In this way, every white-collar employee has at least one or two simple repetitive tasks that they have to deal with on a daily basis in addition to their regular duties. It’s difficult to have a separate person for this task, and it’s impossible to create a separate system. This is where RPA comes in.
RPA’s impact on the enterprise
You can think of RPA as a computer doing the work for you, like recording and playing back what you’re doing. It automates tasks by capturing and executing actions at the screen level that you use every day. Imagine you have a daily task of copying and pasting your daily entries into a specific excel file into a specific menu in your ERP.
RPA does this exactly as you would do it, meaning it opens the excel file for you and inserts or copies the regularized values. In the case of ERP, the RPA will log in, enter the values you copied from Excel, and hit the save button. In other words, RPA takes over the work that humans do with specific rules.
The advantage of RPA is that it can automate without requiring large-scale development or changes to systems that exist inside and outside the organization. In addition, automation can span multiple systems rather than a 1:1 relationship. This means that specialized services can be developed for small departments or individuals. Each service may not seem like a big deal, but when aggregated across the company, it can lead to more efficient workforce management and, most importantly, a better understanding of employee job satisfaction and DX effectiveness.
If you’re pitching RPA to the C-suite, here’s how you might explain it “It’s like hiring an AI employee for each department. Imagine they’re the newest member of your team, and think about what you want them to do. You could have the AI take over all of the simple, repetitive tasks, freeing up other employees to focus on things that require a little more thought. Whether you have one or 100 of these AI people, it doesn’t make much difference from a cost of ownership perspective.”
RPA: A key component of your digital transformation strategy
As you mature in your actual use of RPA, you may find that you’re dealing with simple repetitive tasks at first, and then changing your company’s processes to fit RPA entirely. What was once possible by creating a separate system is now possible in a very efficient way. This can be the beginning of sustainable DX.