“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… if they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.”- John Chambers, Cisco System
The process by which organizations successfully utilize new digital technologies and methods to generate value for customers, shareholders, employees, and suppliers is known as Digital Transformation.
There is a strong relationship between digital transformation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Together, RPA and Digital transformation can help organizations change their business models and operations to be more agile, efficient, and secure. In particular, digital transformation can help firms exploit new technologies, such as blockchain or artificial intelligence. In contrast, RPA helps automate manual tasks to be done faster and with greater accuracy. By working together, these two innovations can help businesses modernize quickly while preserving their legacy systems and processes.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation helps companies achieve It includes artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics, data science, and big data management. It also includes visualization tools, cloud computing services, and infrastructure management in a storage system or network.
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology across all functions of an organization. It significantly alters the way business is done and provides value to consumers. Also, this transformation is a cultural shift that demands organizations to challenge the status quo, experiment, and build tolerance for failure.
RPA and its Role in Agile Software Development
The robotic process automation industry is expected to generate around $22.5 Billion by 2025.
RPA’s capabilities allow organizations to tackle significant operational challenges, such as executing large amounts of back-office activities. The Big Data analytical capabilities provided by an RPA service provider enable organizations to gain knowledge about their business patterns and the performance of their workflows. This information can be used to implement digital strategies that make processes more efficient. RPA also helps to achieve digital transformation in a quick and straightforward manner.
How to Plan RPA as a Part of Digital Transformation?
When setting up an RPA program, it is essential to ensure that the objectives of the program are in line with the organization’s wider digital transformation strategy. Across all industries, there are many different types of use cases that can be impacted by RPA and digital transformation. This includes healthcare clinicians, corporate recruiters, product owners, and chatbots. Each one of these groups can see major process silo improvements by implementing a combination of RPA and digital transformation.
As RPA grows in popularity among enterprises, IT leaders must plan ways to handle these automation initiatives as part of their digital transformation journey. Many companies struggle with scaling and only see limited success when they start with a few dozen bots. RPA and intelligent automation are often hyped up as being easy to scale, but they require proper governance and a strategy for supporting large software bot fleets.
RPA usually excels in a more dependable and enduring process or system instead of a volatile one. Application changes can sometimes make the RPA deployment irrelevant. Enterprises must evaluate RPA’s effectiveness according to their overall digital transformation roadmap and sidestep systems and processes that might go through a drastic near-term transformation.
Companies need a fast, cost-effective means to realign information systems with the business processes they support. Robotic process automation (RPA) is proven in this role. Typical RPA projects are completed in under six weeks and generate positive return on investment in months. Business processes can be automated by substituting humans with computers and deferring repetitive and routine tasks to software robots.
Financial institutions — By automating the process of generating invoices and sending them to various departments for approvals, RPA can help reduce the scope for errors and the need for human intervention. This, in turn, can help to facilitate customer payments online.
Bank Of America implemented the usage of meta robots to automate and handle financial transactions. To further streamline the process they implemented Pega robotic automation solution in partnership with Pegasystems.
Healthcare Industry — One of the top health insurers in India, Max Healthcare, processed a large number of case files every day from all states. To manage the vast amount of data, the business had to pool a significant amount of manual labor. They were able to decrease their response time with uiPath, which resulted in quicker claims processing and more client satisfaction.
RPA and digital transformation often involve working with data-driven technologies that can help organizations achieve their goals faster and better than ever before.
Implementation Challenges and Coping Mechanisms
1) Legacy systems and processes must be adapted or replaced in order to cater to the new digital environment.
2) New technology needs to be installed and integrated into existing infrastructure.
3) The computing power required to manage all the incoming data streams must be increased.
4) Coordination between various business units may need significant improvement to achieve overall corporate strategic goals.
To overcome these challenges, it is important to assess the current operations and business model with a critical eye. This can help to identify if operations are done on legacy technology and which parts of the business model could be improved with the adoption of new technology.
RPA is implemented to integrate legacy systems by automating repetitive, data entry tasks. Completely eliminating excessive workforce, saving time, and reducing errors.
With AI integration RPA systems are now much more capable and efficient, employees can now access historic data with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). RPA can now seamlessly automate the process of transferring data through these interfaces to cloud-based applications.
Based on the data recorded by legacy systems over the years, the RPA systems infused with digital transformation work towards providing digital solutions that are fast with high computational speed. These systems now enable users to access millions of data points in an instant.
More than 50 % of industry leaders have admitted that implementing digital transformation has increased revenue over time. Improving internal processes improves overall efficiency which in turn significantly improved
Bottom line…
RPA and digital transformation are concepts that are being widely touted in the industry. They can work together to create an efficient process. However, when deploying RPA services, it is important to consider the downstream effects and measure the impact. To make sure the initiative is successful, the focus should be on the basics and all stakeholders must be involved right from the beginning.
By automating repetitive tasks across numerous sites or divisions, RPA for digital transformation can help businesses scale. Companies can lower costs, increase efficiency, and enhance customer experiences by digitizing these processes and making them accessible in an automated format.
Originally published at https://apptread.com on October 18, 2022.
