The Way Forward with RPA

Analyst Viewpoint

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a core digital technology for increasing productivity and efficiency, speeding the completion of work, and increasing its quality and controllability. The use of RPA is evolving to include a broader set of more complex automation capabilities, and by infusing intelligent methods and techniques in processes, RPA can be instrumented for very sophisticated processing.

RPA can go beyond automating tactical processes to be a strategic digital workforce capable of performing business-critical tasks that require connecting multiple systems and data stores reliably at scale.

RPA software acts as a “digital worker” (and so collectively, a “digital workforce”) that performs rote repetitive jobs so humans can concentrate on work that requires their experience and judgement. Usage of RPA began with the automation of discrete tasks within multi-step processes, but today the tools have grown to be highly versatile and can bring advanced digital techniques to bear, such as text and speech translation, blockchain incorporation, sentiment analysis and response, elastic search, and machine learning that enables them to handle increasingly complex requirements. And due to ongoing advancements in hardware capabilities, these digital workers can handle even more resource-intensive and time-consuming tasks and processes. RPA can go beyond automating tactical processes to be a strategic digital workforce capable of performing business-critical tasks that require connecting multiple systems and data stores reliably at scale.

RPA vendors can help organizations develop a strategic digital workforce by accelerating the time to value of automation via pre-built reusable automation components. RPA has advanced with “low-code” or “no-code” functionality, so non-developers and a wider set of business users can now apply RPA without having to write code. The skills needed to configure these tools are more easily accessed thus reducing the cost and time of resources and increasing potential ROI. Given this increased accessibility, the wide range of common use cases includes:

• Gathering data from multiple systems necessary for core process such as the accounting close and handling exceptions to shorten the close.
• Onboarding vendors, customers or employees, since this typically requires a repeatable set of back-and-forth interactions with people or systems that gather data and communicate status.
• Managing an order, because this involves a broad set of tasks such as verifying the address, printing or emailing the invoice, printing a shipping label and updating warehouse inventory.

The list of potential uses is long, but RPA can handle any volume of simple and complex tasks where some combination of faster completion time, timelier or consistently accurate data, greater control or lower costs provides a competitive advantage.

To enable organizations to develop a strategic digital workforce, RPA vendors must go beyond providing pre-built reusable components that work with basic software such as Excel and Outlook. They should also work with key business applications like the ERP system. For example, one specific use of RPA is accelerating migrations of legacy on-premises SAP ERP systems to S/4HANA in the cloud. These migrations have become a priority for two reasons. First, SAP is ending support for these older legacy systems. Second, because of the need to operate in a virtual mode, organizations have recognized the advantages of having their systems in the cloud to promote business continuity and resiliency. RPA applies task automation to substantially reduce the number of person-hours needed to accomplish an SAP cloud migration. Software that uses a library of visual business objects, templates built around SAP’s transaction codes and easily modified pre-built automations can enable organizations to significantly shorten the process of taking their existing on-premises ERP instances and migrating them to S/4HANA. RPA also can streamline and speed up existing on-premises SAP operations.

RPA’s ability to perform more complex operations and apply reusable components to a range of tasks across a broader set of applications has significantly increased the addressable value of the technology while cutting costs and shortening the time to realize that value. A new level of reliability brings improved resilience to the enterprise, and this impact can be measured by the number of digital workers that automatically carry out any number of tasks for business processes across departments, business units and to external parties. The sophistication of the processing enables a wide breadth of options for linking to devices, applications, systems and data sources. And new computational techniques in machine learning now enable these digital workers to perform their tasks without human intervention. Taken together, these advancements mean the scope of applications that can utilize RPA will continue to expand across a wide range of business processes and enterprise applications.