Despite the hype around machines taking over the world and concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and its penetration into virtually all areas of our lives, not all “robotic” technologies cause such anxiety. Those that can relieve us from routine, repetitive tasks are not just highly appreciated; they are increasingly applied across industries.
Business process automation has been around for decades — after all, it’s one of the key reasons why IT as we know it left science labs and landed on billions of office desks around the globe. Getting rid of routine operations and reducing the amount of tedious manual work is what software developers always aspire to achieve.
Today, basic automation is widely used in industries dealing with large volumes of template-based documents, application forms, and other sets of data that need to be validated, converted, moved along various workflows, or archived for future use. However, as the complexity of such systems grows, it creates a need for more intelligent automation (aka autonomous and self-sustaining) solutions. This is why robotic process automation (RPA) applications came into existence.
In this article, we underscore the significance of directing attention to RPA projects and share compelling RPA examples, going beyond the hype and delving into practical insights and reasons behind their enduring relevance.
Key benefits of RPA applications
RPA technology fulfills an important role, taking over repetitive, monotonous, and dreary tasks that distract users from higher-value work that requires human reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and, importantly, face-to-face human interactions. Bots never get tired or demotivated, can work 24/7, and never procrastinate.
Among the major benefits of robotic process automation is that it typically does not require software development in the conventional sense, thus saving time and money for companies undertaking RPA initiatives. However, this doesn’t mean that RPA is a point-and-click technology that can be arbitrarily deployed by any employee. Successful cases of robotic process automation implementation are based on professional business analysis, deployment and configuration of an RPA framework, and its continual improvement.
The trend of adopting enterprise RPA technology is strong, and the RPA market is expected to hit the 13 billion–dollar mark by 2030. According to a global Deloitte survey, over half of large enterprise companies use RPA tools, embedding them into their business processes and immediately enjoying the benefits. These investments have an amazingly short payback period of less than 12 months and come with a number of complementary bonuses, from improved compliance and higher quality to soaring productivity and overall cost reduction through intelligent process automation.
Read also: Enterprise Platform Solutions
Main clusters of robotic process automation projects
The benefits of robotic process automation can be narrowed down to several areas:
| Compliance | Many routine tasks that support regulatory compliance, such as preparing reports, monitoring requirement changes, or verifying policies against regulations can be assigned to bots. |
|---|---|
| Business optimization | Making robots part of the business process allows for allocating valuable human resources to more complex tasks. Moreover, leveraging RPA capabilities allows businesses to optimize payrolls by eliminating automatable functions. |
| Reduced error rate | Robots working according to predefined scenarios perform tasks consistently, reducing the probability of errors. As a result, businesses face lower risks of non-compliance, equipment failure or breakdown. |
| Higher customer satisfaction | Consistent performance, 24/7 availability, and fewer errors raise the overall quality of service. Consequently, RPA adopters are likely to see growing customer loyalty, fewer support requests, and more business coming their way. |
| Employee satisfaction and retention | With routine and repeated tasks done by RPA services, employees can be more efficient in handling complex cases and feel more satisfied with their work results. In addition, RPA implementation leaves people more time for self-development and education. |
At the same time, it’s important to distinguish between RPA applications and the yet nascent cognitive or intelligent automation, a much more advanced and technically complex discipline based natural language processing (NLP) , speech synthesis, advanced computer vision, machine learning, and many other evolving technologies.
Intelligent automation continuum
Source: IBM
Robotic process automation use cases
To better understand the impact of this technology on different industries, let’s take a look at how businesses use RPA to automate various processes.
Mobility, transportation, and logistics
The transportation and logistics industries offer perfect examples of robotic process automation adoption. With hundreds of manual operations in offices and warehouses and complex fleet management and order processing systems, these industries can benefit from automation in more than one way:
- Improved productivity
- Reduced costs
- Better customer service
- Focus on strategic planning
- Lower error rate
These trends can be clearly observed in the evolution of the logistics automation market, which is growing steadily and is projected to exceed $50 billion by 2028. While this figure accounts for all possible applications of logistics automation solutions, RPA is responsible for a notable share of this projected growth, too.
Scheduling
As straightforward as shipment scheduling may be, it is full of simple tasks that are prime candidates for automation: sending confirmations, updating statuses, extracting data from customer requests, creating jobs in logistics systems, and many more.
When such mundane tasks are performed by automation tools, order execution speeds up, overall process quality rises, and, consequently, the company gets more happy customers.
Fleet management
An RPA tool can be integrated into a fleet management platform to streamline multiple vehicle administration tasks. For example, a logistics company can use RPA to handle vehicle financing and registration, coordinate fleet availability, and manage fuel cards and tolls.
These jobs require lots of minute details to be entered, processed, and consolidated, and here automation tools can show much better results than humans. With RPA, data management accelerates significantly, while the error rate is lowered.
Order processing and tracking
Order processing flows also involve lots of manual procedures, such as retrieving information, searching for and updating inventory, entering and updating customer records in a CRM or ERP system, and processing payments. Robots can easily take over these tasks, bringing consistency and speed in order processing.
The same approach can be applied to order tracking, with RPA applications and solutions helping customers look up their order statuses, change or cancel orders, and get notified of any changes.
Documentation management
Often, logistics companies use RPA tools to generate documentation accompanying shipments – invoices, packing lists, waybills, and more. In many cases, such documents are built using details available in customer requests, corresponding orders, and fleet management systems.
RPA can be used to consolidate this information into required documents, forming a complete package of shipping documentation conforming to applicable regulations. Moreover, documentation can be generated with minimum manual effort, significantly expediting the process.
Inventory management and procurement
In a logistics business, inventory updates play a critical role, as product availability is the main factor in successfully receiving and fulfilling customer orders. All changes in inventory must be monitored —especially when items become low in stock — and notifications sent to decision-makers.
An automation tool can map existing inventory data to current orders, maintaining accurate inventory information in real time. As soon as the product quantity falls below a certain threshold, the tool should notify the manager responsible or even place an order automatically.
Agriculture
RPA is revolutionizing the Agrifood sector by automating tasks such as data entry and inventory management, which enhances operational efficiency, ensures a steady flow of accurate information, and facilitates regulatory compliance. RPA also plays a key role in reducing the need for manual labor, promoting precision agriculture, and contributing to environmental sustainability. This approach minimizes the environmental impact associated with traditional farming practices, conserving resources like water reducing fertilizer use through data-driven decisions. Agricultural automation is distinguished by extensive use of sensors, drones, and IoT devices, increasing productivity through advanced technology. Adoption of agricultural automation is growing steadily, with more than half of farmers planning to increase their investments in technology solutions.
In addition to taking over manual processes, automation brings agricultural enterprises lots of other benefits:
- Higher productivity
- Reduced costs
- Data precision
- Consistency regardless of weather conditions
- Lower environmental impact
Crop monitoring
Automated solutions gathering real-time data from various sensors create a complete picture of current crop conditions: soil moisture, air temperature, crop health, and others. Based on this data, farmers can make decisions on how and when to irrigate, fertilize, introduce pesticides, or harvest.
With RPA tools used for crop monitoring, farmers have much closer control over their crops and can catch problems early enough to take corrective measures.
Supply chain optimization
Agricultural enterprises can use RPA to automate order processing, manage inventory, and monitor shipping. This way, farmers not only ensure perpetual inventory of the necessary tools, seeds, and products, but also guarantee that their produce reaches the consumer in the freshest state possible and in strict compliance with applicable standards.
Automated functions can be used to set up logistics to minimize spoilage and related losses for farmers. Such optimization together with automated quality control boosts a farm’s competitiveness and reputation.
Soil preparation
Soil sensors collecting various data from different patches of land can build a complete view of a farm’s soil types in one soil health management system. An RPA application can structure such data and present it in an easily comprehensible format that allows for making validated decisions.
Based on sensor data, a farmer can select the right nutrients for each plot of land and determine the most appropriate time to introduce them.
Precision agriculture
Precision agriculture describes an approach to farming based on closely observing crops and building an agricultural strategy based on the obtained data. In this context, RPA tools are a perfect fit for their data collection and processing capabilities.
Introduction of automation into a precision farming and agriculture action plan brings additional accuracy into observations, leading to even more optimized resource use
Yield prediction
Predictive capabilities of RPA applications allow farmers to make more or less accurate forecasts of their future crops. Considering such factors as weather conditions, crop type, soil condition, and the nutrients and pesticides applied on a particular patch of land, an RPA tool can provide insights into future crop yields.
Based on such data-powered analytics, farmers can make or adjust action plans and take necessary measures to protect their crops from diseases, pests, or unfavorable weather conditions.
Manufacturing
RPA is a natural fit for manufacturing, as it automates repetitive tasks, reducing operational costs and enhancing precision in production processes. The manufacturing industry has been trying to automate its processes for as long as it has existed. Nowadays, manufacturing leads the rating of industries adopting RPA with as much as 35% of businesses using RPA. The RPA market in manufacturing is expected to grow to $99 billion by 2032. By automating routine processes, RPA allows manufacturing professionals to focus on strategic decision-making, ultimately accelerating production timelines and ensuring greater agility and competitiveness.
Implementing RPA solutions in the manufacturing industry brings tons of benefits, the most notable of which are:
- Cost savings
- Higher productivity
- Increased quality
- Minimized equipment downtime
- Shorter time to market
Inventory management
Automation can facilitate many inventory-related processes, both on the raw materials side and on the production side. RPA tools monitor the quantity of materials and inform personnel about critical levels. Sometimes, they even place automated orders according to predefined procedures.
At the same time, RPA applications control the quantity of goods ready to be supplied to customers and provide regular updates to distribution departments, helping them better plan deliveries.
Administrative tasks
Any manufacturing is accompanied by tons of administrative tasks and paperwork. Automation tools can become part of administrative processes, taking over small but numerous jobs and freeing time and effort of employees.
For example, RPA tools can document meeting minutes, maintain duty rosters, schedule events and notify the people concerned, as well as generate or update any other documentation.
Supply chain management
RPA tools can be useful at any stage of a manufacturing supply chain, from planning to invoice processing and fleet management. They extract data from documents and structure it into an easily consumable format that allows users to plan and track shipments, notify customers, and issue invoices.
Supply chain management practices reduce the number of errors in logistics operations, streamline processes, and ensure that all necessary information is always up to date.
Predictive maintenance
Manufacturing enterprises can use RPA to industrial equipment and machinery for any failures or deviations from the norm – gas leaks, temperatures or pressures that are too high or low, power failures, and more. When the state of equipment is monitored in real time, it becomes much easier to detect problems before they lead to major breakdowns.
Such predictive maintenance measures reduce equipment downtime, ensure continuity of manufacturing processes, and ultimately reduce maintenance costs.
Regulatory compliance
Manufacturing processes are subject to various regulations, from labor laws and worker protection standards to product quality controls. Such requirements are changed and updated quite often, causing manufacturers to adjust their processes accordingly.
RPA tools can facilitate compliance processes by following regulatory updates, comparing existing policies to new requirements, and informing decision-makers about necessary changes.
Insurance
Insurance is one of the avid adopters of RPA solutions. The market for RPA in insurance is growing at 28.3% annually and is forecast to reach $1.2 billion by 2031. The reason is clear – the insurance industry is swamped by monotonous, repetitive work, such as creating policies, collecting regular payments, and gathering information.
These are just a few examples of insurance processes that can be automated. In fact, the industry has the potential of turning up to 50-60% of its functions over to RPA , taking the burden off the shoulders of insurance agents.
Implementing RPA in insurance brings significant benefits:
- Accelerated claims processing
- Higher accuracy and precision
- Cost savings
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Analytical opportunities
Claim registration
Filing an insurance claim always means gathering massive amounts of information from lots of different sources. When done manually, this process is lengthy and cumbersome, not to mention tedious for insurance agents. As a result, claim processing takes lots of time, annoying customers and lowering their satisfaction rate.
When robotic process automation scenarios enter the process, data extraction, collection, and systematization get much faster. Humans only need to study information gathered and pre-screened by RPA tools and process a claim accordingly. Each case can be resolved faster, leaving customers satisfied.
Underwriting
As in every industry, insurance is focused on bringing in new clients. However, since the financial and reputational consequences of lack of due diligence may be huge, agencies invest a lot in evaluating clients and eventual risks before signing an agreement.
With RPA, the process of scraping information from multiple public sources and sorting it for further analysis becomes quicker. No manual work is involved, and agents can start working with preprocessed data to finalize approvals much faster — meaning more business for the company.
Regulatory compliance
Insurance is a heavily regulated industry with a fast-changing compliance landscape, so companies need to constantly monitor changes and adjust their policies. A small error can lead to heavy consequences and penalties.
RPA can be used to make compliance more straightforward by automating such mundane tasks as validating customer data, generating reports, or sending notifications.
Policy administration
Each insurance policy requires tons of administrative work – quoting, rating, renewing, canceling, and a lot more. What makes the process even more difficult is that policy administration usually involves several departments, with all the bumps of a siloed organization.
Insurance companies can set up robotic process automation scenarios to take over routine policy administration tasks accelerating the processes and expediting claim settlements. Again, such improvements can lead to a boost in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Financial operations
Of course, financial services require a lot of human intervention, especially in unique cases. However, payment and account management involves dozens of repetitive operations, such as collecting regular payments, filling out forms, generating reports, and sending notifications to customers.
Such tasks can be safely assigned to RPA tools, freeing accountants and financial experts for matters that need a human touch.
Government
Governments are traditionally considered to be extremely inefficient (though this is changing with digital transformation in government picking up steam globally). Public agencies are arguably the largest receivers and processors of countless forms, applications, claims, and other documents requiring quick turnover. With their well-defined processes, government institutions are a perfect fit for RPA implementation, which would result in the provision of faster and higher-quality services to the public.
Gartner supports this trend with a forecast that by 2024, 75% of governments will have implemented at least three hyperautomation initiatives. Implementing RPA projects in the public sector promises quite tangible benefits:
- Cost savings
- Process improvements
- Increased lifespan of legacy systems
- People-centric service
- Better citizen experience
Data entry
A large chunk of government work is processing various applications, claims, registrations, and other official documents. In each case, there will surely be one or several forms to be filled out, background checks to be done, and data to be entered into the system.
This is where RPA applications can be of great use. They can handle data entry, considerably expediting processes and reducing the amount of manual work involved.
Procurement
Government offices make numerous purchases that are subject to strict reporting and accounting. As a result, all procurement processes are accompanied by extensive documentation and thorough checks.
To speed up these processes and minimize errors, governments can use RPA tools for comparing quotes, issuing reports, reconciling invoices, and performing other routine tasks.
Human resources
Robots can play a role in employee onboarding by running self-paced learning courses, conducting quizzes and tests, and supporting self-service information portals for employees. Of course, at this point, it is too early to expect onboarding processes to become fully automated, but RPA applications can make it more flexible and satisfactory.
An additional benefit is that while completing RPA-driven onboarding activities, new employees can get to know the organization’s knowledge management system, potentially making them more productive in their actual work.
Citizen service
RPA can be used for providing citizen services too. Many routine issues with which people reach out to government agencies can be resolved by looking up an article in a knowledge base or making a simple automated request.
When a government agency implements intelligent automation (for example, in the form of a chatbot), it can provide service much faster and more effectively, as simple issues can be resolved almost immediately, while more complex ones can be handled by representatives who can concentrate better on providing quality service.
Financial activities
Intelligent process automation tools can also help in the sphere of government finance. Processing of regular payments, reports, notifications via various communication channels – all these tasks can be automated.
As a result, agencies can ensure satisfactory performance of their departments and regulatory compliance. Automation tools can make sure payments are made on time and notifications are sent well in advance.
Examples of RPA solutions in business operations
Examples of robotic process automation successfully implemented in various businesses can be found in many industries. As adoption of RPA applications grows, the number of companies using RPA tools increases accordingly. Let’s look at a couple of real-life RPA examples.
Automated order cancellation solution for a logistics company
An international supply chain business was challenged with a problem of handling multiple order cancellation requests coming from different geographic areas and time zones. Handling order cancelations manually put a lot of pressure on the company’s employees and affected inventory management.
An RPA project designed for the logistics business reshaped the order cancellation flows, making processing 10 times faster and reducing the number of errors. The company noted an overall improvement in order processing efficiency and customer satisfaction due to streamlined workflows and accelerated processing.
Back-office automation for a telecom business
A large telecom company was struggling with making offers to new customers due to cumbersome manual tariff calculation. While taking a lot of time and effort, the existing calculation process was also prone to errors that caused incorrect information to be delivered to customers.
Successful implementation of an effective RPA solution for tariff calculation led to introducing automation in other business processes related to customer account management, which streamlined multiple workflows, reduced operational costs by 74%, and improved the quality of offers made to telecom customers.
Automated greenhouse system for agribusinesses
Farmers and agricultural businesses using greenhouses to grow their crops used to collect and process greenhouse data manually, which led to significant delays in obtaining results and making farming recommendations. As a result, deviations from ideal conditions weren’t identified in a timely manner, which could affect crops.
An RPA-based monitoring system for indoor farms and greenhouses was a huge improvement compared to manual processes. The solution aggregated multiple types of data, including temperature, humidity, light, and plant and soil conditions, and presented it to the customer in a format that could be easily consumed by analytical tools.
With the implementation of advanced robotic process automation, farmers are witnessing increased efficiency of their workflows due to streamlined monitoring and a lower error rate.
Predictive management solution for the manufacturing industry
Industrial companies face a problem of dealing with unexpected equipment downtime, which causes billion-dollar losses globally. An automated solution for monitoring the state and performance of equipment and detecting oil and gas leaks was designed to provide real-time visibility into machinery conditions and notify personnel about deviations from the norm.
As a result of implementing this RPA solution for predictive maintenance, equipment uptime increased by 20%. Other benefits of RPA include reduced maintenance costs, lower incident rates, and increased enterprise productivity. Overall, the use of RPA solutions for manufacturing opens new growth opportunities for businesses.
Conclusion
RPA is transforming from a hyped and disruptive technology into an integral element for growth in virtually every industry globally. While adopters need to be cautious about certain considerations, the inherent benefits of RPA are tangible and clear. RPA technology serves as a foundational element for broader initiatives aimed at automating routine tasks, leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sophisticated cognitive mechanisms. The trajectory of RPA adoption suggests a coming surge in compelling robotic process automation projects. In this context, working with an implementation and integration technology partner becomes crucial for ensuring seamless incorporation of RPA into organizational processes and maximizing its transformative potential.
At Intellias, we view innovation as the strategic application of the right technology within specific business environments. Recognized globally, Intellias is a trusted partner for businesses seeking practical technology solutions delivered for their unique needs. Our expertise as a system integrator goes beyond disrupting the digital landscape; we focus on implementing cross-technology solutions that not only drive revenue but are also designed to be accessible, actionable, and resilient. With a focus on pragmatic everyday applications, we help our clients navigate the challenges of the digital with confidence and purpose, seamlessly integrating technology, platforms, and features.
