The Role of RPA in Digital Transformation
Role of RPA : For any significant industry around the world, the largest and most common trend is digital transformation. In every possible scope of business activities, there is a shift in motion towards digitalization, which enables the operating models of companies to evolve exponentially and help better the various aspects of the business including consumer satisfaction, increased optimum business output and a better place for the business in the market competition.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation can be defined as the process through which digital technology is integrated into all the aspects of an enterprise, consequently turning around the way the enterprise works in terms of both performance and reach. Digital transformation is very much a cultural phenomenon as much as it is a technological one. Slow and continual changes are being executed in all industries to make new types of customer relationships, pioneer new processes and attach newer values to their products.
What is RPA?
RPA or Robotic Process Automation is a potent software tool that enables carrying out business tasks that are rule-based and consume a longer amount of time when carried out manually in a more efficient manner where the cycle time is cut down along with the cost at a higher level than other tools available for automation in the market. According to the estimates of PwC, with the help of RPA an organisation can automate almost 45% of its workload and a collective implementation could amount to a cut down by $2 trillion in the global workforce cost.
RPA as a technological tool can, in many ways, support digital transformation while maintaining improving business output. Many companies are trying to integrate RPA into their mode of operation in order to keep up with new consumer demands and pressure of the market.
How does RPA support digital transformation?
As mentioned before, RPA helps an organization carry out more burdensome and time consuming manual office activities in lesser time and with lesser money spent on them. These tasks can be of any category, such as processing claims, processes related to Human Resources, invoicing, data transfer and so on. Thus, RPA is equipped to assist businesses of all industriesat every phase of their operation into a digital transformation. Apart from handling back-office operations, RPA also comes with the capacity of analysing Big Data, therefore allowing companies to gain access into understanding their business pattern as well as their performance. This information in turn can be used to form and implement more efficient and accurate business strategies to make the business procedures smoother.
RPA also helps in quickening and simplifying the process of digital transformation. The robots of the software are trained to copy the employee activities, whether it is a mere task of clicks and copy-pasting or more complicated ones, like invoice. Since RPA works in the same way as a human employee would, it is compatible to work with legacy systems, ERP as well as external platforms, without causing the need to alter these platform designs. This makes its implementation a lot easier and quick- within a few days or weeks. Once the pressure of the back-office activities are taken out of the way by RPA, employees are free to focus on more complicated tasks of higher values, which include marketing, sales, customer relations, business strategies and so on. The front office is able to work on making the consumer experience as smooth as possible and a higher rate of consumer satisfaction results in increased retention of customers. Hence, RPA not only directly helps in implementing digital transformation in an organisation, but also allows other machineries of the enterprise to function better and focus on more complex activities, indirectly assisting in the non-technical, more strategic aspects of the business.
Even though RPA can very well support the process of digital transformation, it is not the necessary and sufficient condition to carry it through. It is still highly dependent on the individuals working in the organisation to trigger the improvements. The benefits of RPA can be optimised only when there is sufficient coordination between the management and project teams of the company, along with all the other employees. According to Deloitte, it is important for an organisation to have digital leaders who are ready to bring in new innovations and are not afraid to make changes in order to support digital strategies and reimagine the business in a more digitised fashion.
