RPA – Shaping the future of a digital enterprise

A commissioned study by Forrester Consulting to explore the best RPA operating model practices to deliver long-term value to stakeholders.

Businesses today are constantly reinventing the way they operate. Technology has become an integral part of a business aiming to transform digitally. Enterprises are striving to become more agile to keep pace with the changing dynamics of the market and to cater to the ever-increasing demands of the customers. This requires transformation across functions, bringing in fundamental changes to business processes, technology, structures, and channels.

In a typical business environment, where the focus is more on improving customer experience, product innovation and catalysing response time, digital transformation is often given lesser priority. At this juncture, when adapting to new technology is seen as a complex process, automation technologies particularly the robotic process automation (RPA) have made a tremendous progress and emerged as the best solution. RPA is an automated process powered by machine learning capabilities to handle a high volume of rule-based and repetitive tasks. It is best known for its abilities to increase productivity and enabling employees to focus more on strategically relevant tasks.

“3 out of 4 firms said RPA software boosts employee morale by reducing the amount of process-driven work.”

The path less-travelled

Though digitization is making its way into most organizations, business leaders and IT leaders are still reluctant to walk this path, as that would mean doing away with the old systems and processes and adapting new technologies, which pose a lot of challenges.
In many organizations, mundane and low-value tasks are still being handled by humans. RPA automates these mundane tasks, thereby improving productivity and helping employees focus on higher-value work.

For instance, a large telecom group managing multiple companies in mobile, IP TV, broadband etc. was faced with challenges related to customer service. Their agents were required to coordinate effectively with field technicians in order to resolve the issues on time. AssistEdge from EdgeVerve, an Infosys Subsidiary, helped them integrate many of their applications and data across companies thus providing access to right expertise enabling agents to address customer concerns in real time, each time. This helped enhance customer service with drastic reduction in query handling time, which in turn helped save cost too.

RPA benefits not just operations, but businesses as a whole

With past experience and learning, RPA tools have also matured and can perform large scale end-to-end processes with little human interaction. This means firms can benefit at large when RPA is used across functions and processes. RPA has optimized more than 66% processes in functions such as finance and accounting.

Apart from this, RPA also enhances customer experience by providing the technology required to find answers, without relying on human workers. Though predominantly back-office driven, RPA does affect other areas of business, enabling employees and businesses to focus on what they are best at.

Challenges in Controlling and Operating RPA

Though RPA is fast becoming a sought after technology adopted by most organizations, there are still certain operational barriers faced by some enterprises that are preventing them from leveraging RPA’s full capabilities.

To overcome these technical and operational challenges, RPA should be implemented across functions and not limited to certain function or team. In order to have a better control on operations and ensure business continuity, it is recommended to have an internal delivery and implementation team, which will lead the automation initiative and establish a centre of excellence. It is imperative to formalize the assessment model early in the RPA journey and to guide the process of RPA selection to reap its benefits to the fullest. This helps save cost and boost productivity. The proofs of concept enable both business and IT to work toward a common goal and, finally, the implementation of technology.

Choosing the right technology partner to get the best of RPA

It is important to partner with the right technology vendor to plan and implement RPA in an organization. Vendors sometimes allow organizations to trial the technology to understand how it will extend into their wider operations and to demonstrate the potential for RPA and its tangible value. But firms will really find it useful to work with technology vendors that have a track record in the RPA landscape.

Ensure you select partners who provide control and operations management; offer proof of scalability and provide a cognitive road map. Contrary to the common notion, having a cognitive road map doesn’t mean jobs will be replaced; quite the opposite.

RPA – The driving force behind business success

As the organizations are rapidly changing the way they are doing business, it is going to become inevitable to adapt technology, especially if they want to empower their employees by enabling them to focus on more strategic tasks. We have barely scratched the surface of RPA capabilities today. Once reporting and analytics are used for RPA, the results will be outstanding. RPA Analytics and AI Integration becomes critical to create a success story. AssistEdge from EdgeVerve, acclaimed for its RPA Analytics and AI Integration capabilities by Forrester, caters to multiple roles and industries. Enabling enterprises to span the entire gamut of automation continuum from deterministic through predictive to cognitive automation, it leads the way to a wider range of enterprise benefits.