What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is software that automates repetitive tasks typically performed by humans in digital systems. By mimicking human actions, RPA bots help businesses run smoother, work faster and make fewer mistakes.

What Is Robotic Process Automation?

RPA refers to software bots that follow a set of instructions for completing simple, repetitive tasks using structured data. They are programmed to imitate the human actions required to accomplish this work, such as clicking buttons, dragging files and copy-pasting information. Once they learn, bots can do these things automatically, and often much faster and more accurately than humans. As a result, RPA plays a major role in reducing employee burnout and other negative consequences that often come with mundane work.

“Think of it like outsourcing work,” said Lou Bachenheimer, CTO for the Americas at enterprise automation company SS&C Blue Prism. “It can click here, type information there, read what’s written there, and pull all that together.”

When to Use RPA

How do you know if you should use robotic process automation? A key indicator that RPA could be helpful is if a task involves employees performing lots of repetitive work involving data. When translating this task into instructions for a software bot, there should be a set of rules for the bot to follow and a clear-cut goal. Any task that meets these criteria can be undertaken by robotic process automation.

Benefits of RPA

Greater Consistency 

Humans don’t always perform tasks perfectly, especially if those tasks are repetitive or require close attention to detail. They misclick, misspell, forget. That isn’t the case with RPA. Bots follow predefined rules consistently, without straying or getting tired, so tasks are performed more accurately and reliably. 

A 2023 McKinsey survey confirms this advantage, with 97 percent of respondents saying automation has a positive or highly positive impact on the quality of their products. And because bots don’t commit errors or take breaks, 95 percent of respondents claimed automation had a positive or highly positive impact on their speed of production and delivery.  

Increased Cost-Efficiency

RPA bots can perform repetitive tasks much faster than a human ever could, reducing the amount of money needed to complete that work. Bots are “drastically cheaper” than human employees, Bachenheimer said, which allows companies to save on labor costs. This aligns with a 2022 Deloitte survey, which found that companies that embraced automation strategies enjoyed higher percentages of reduced costs and increased revenue over a three-year span. 

Improved Compliance

RPA bots adhere to predefined rules to handle simple tasks, making it easy to audit and review their work at any time. This makes RPA a much safer automation option than artificial intelligence, particularly in highly regulated industries. AI hallucinates, and it makes decisions even experts can’t fully explain.

“AI can be a black box that can be a compliance nightmare,” Bachenheimer said. “Especially in more regulated industries, if you can do it with simple rules, nine times out of 10 [RPA] is going to be your best bet.” 

Higher Productivity 

Bachenheimer estimates that one bot working round-the-clock can do the work of as many as 10 full-time human employees. In fact, the state of Tennessee found that RPA saved over 100,000 hours of work annually after the government implemented 120 bots across executive branch agencies. Achieving this kind of productivity via automation means governments, businesses and other organizations can use fewer resources to complete more work. 

Enhanced Employee Satisfaction

By automating mundane and tedious tasks, RPA gives employees more time to focus on work that requires strategic thinking. This is key to staving off a phenomenon known as boreout, where employees suffer health effects similar to those of burnout because they feel their work is meaningless. Being able to offer employees more challenging problems can keep them engaged, raise their job satisfaction levels and limit employee turnover. 

Challenges of RPA

Demanding Data Needs

RPA is most effective when working with structured data, or data that has been precisely labeled and organized. “Bots only work in rows and columns,” said Brian Weiss, senior vice president and field CTO at enterprise AI company Hyperscience. “Any unstructured data, that’s not going to work.”

That means companies have to do work on the back end to ensure their data is formatted in a way that a bot can understand. Sometimes, the time and resources needed to accomplish that “far outweigh” whatever benefits an RPA system can provide, said Vijay Tella, co-founder and CEO at enterprise automation company Workato. 

Less Adaptability 

RPA bots are programmed to perform specific tasks within predefined parameters, making them unable to adapt to changing circumstances to handle tasks outside of their scope. 

“Unlike a human, if a bot looks and doesn’t see the file it expects, it’s just going to give up,” said Adam Glaser, senior vice president of product management at process automation company Appian. “It is not nearly as smart as a person, or as resilient.” 

Limited Capabilities

While RPA is great at automating simple, rules-based tasks, its capabilities stop there. “RPA systems do what they are told and that’s it,” Tella said.

Unlike artificial intelligence, bots cannot be creative or learn new things. “They’re not smart at all,” Weiss said. “And they’re never going to get smart.” So they should not be used in any creative or innovative tasks, or work that requires rapid adaptation. 

Scaling Difficulties 

As companies add more bots to perform more tasks, they risk creating an unwieldy web of disparate software that can be challenging to manage and scale at an enterprise level. 

“You’re just creating a pile of things that you’ve got to go clean up next time you want to upgrade,” Weiss said  — in a sense, defeating the whole purpose of automation to begin with.

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RPA Use Cases

RPA bots are used to automate the repetitive, back-office tasks of just about every industry. Virtually any high-volume, rules-driven process can be handled by RPA.  

Banking

In the banking industry, robotic process automation is used to match transactions across multiple accounts in real time to identify discrepancies and flag suspicious activities. It is also used to automate the document verification, credit check and approval process of loan or credit card applications. 

As one of the most regulated industries in the world, financial institutions also use RPA to remain compliant with the law. For example, bots can automatically gather data from disparate sources, including government websites and federal bodies, and input this information into a bank’s internal system to ensure it stays within the guidelines. 

Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, process automation is used to automatically schedule appointments, send reminders and update information in electronic health record systems. It is also used to amalgamate the various costs of tests, medicines, procedures and consultations into one bill, which is then shared with patients and submitted to insurance companies.

On the provider side, RPA is used to update patient records and transfer data between systems, helping to ensure data accuracy and integrity, which could potentially save lives, Bachenheimer said. “Do you know how many people die each year because of typos? Robots don’t make typos.” 

Retail and E-commerce

RPA can be used by retailers to track stores’ inventory levels, automatically reorder products when stock is low and update inventory records in real time. It can also automate order requests, inventory checks and order status updates across multiple systems, speeding up delivery times. 

RPA isn’t just helpful on the back end either, it also makes customers’ lives easier. Bots are often used to automatically respond to inquiries, streamline the returns and refunds process and escalate complex issues to human agents when necessary.  

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is no stranger to automation, with industrial robots and cobots completing repetitive and dangerous manual tasks in factories. Meanwhile, RPA bots are used to automate the digital tasks, including supply chain management, quality control and warehouse management. 

Bots manage orders, track shipments in real time, provide status updates to customers, coordinate freight bookings and other logistics and optimize supply chain operations. They are also used to automate product quality checks and monitor the performance of the manufacturing equipment itself, alerting maintenance teams of any possible issues and triggering any appropriate corrective steps. 

Human Resources

While new employees are onboarding, RPA bots can set up accounts, collect documents and send training assignments as needed, as well as deactivate any accounts during offboarding. They can also assist in collecting timesheet data, benefit information and more to calculate payroll amounts and automatically send direct deposits to employees.

In general, human resources is a data-heavy space. Companies have to maintain records on all employees regarding their pay, performance, insurance and taxes. RPA helps HR teams manage all of this information, reducing errors and giving them more time to tackle the more “human” parts of human resources, like employee engagement and talent development.

How Does RPA Work?

After RPA bots are developed, they are integrated into an existing IT infrastructure or workflow, which involves connecting them to the various systems, databases and applications they’ll need to interact with to do their job. Then, they are put to work, performing the tasks they were programmed to do according to predefined instructions.

Going forward, RPA systems are closely monitored to ensure the bots are performing as expected. Any issues or errors that arise are flagged for human intervention. And the bots are regularly updated or modified as business processes evolve.  

Robotic Process Automation Types

There are three main forms of robotic process automation: attended RPA, unattended RPA and hybrid RPA.

Attended RPA

Attended automation involves human oversight and interaction, where bots have to be manually triggered to complete their tasks. With attended RPA, bots work alongside employees, much like personal assistants. They automate day-to-day tasks like data entry, increasing human productivity. But they must complete each job fully before a user moves them to another activity.

Unattended RPA

Unattended RPA operates on its own, and does not require human oversight or intervention to start an automation process. “There’s no actual person sitting there, watching or guiding or co-piloting the bot,” Glaser said. These bots execute tasks in the background and are typically triggered by specific events, like a scheduled time, a change to a database or when a new file is detected.

Hybrid RPA

Hybrid RPA combines the best of both worlds, giving RPA the versatility to complete tasks while being attended or run in the background. This type of RPA often involves more interactions between a bot and an employee, who can handle decision-making and determine the best ways to apply the bot. Teams often use hybrid RPA when a task is too complex for a bot to finish on its own, requiring the guidance and creative thinking of an employee.

How to Implement RPA

Robotic process automation is only effective when an organization takes a thoughtful approach to adopting it. Here are steps companies can follow to ensure a smooth transition to RPA.  

1. Define the Problem RPA Needs to Address 

Consider the general areas of improvement that need to be resolved. Determining the nature of the problem will make it easier to explain why RPA is necessary to company leadership and inform involved parties on what the ideal RPA solution is for the situation.    

2. Evaluate Processes to Determine Ideal Automations 

After defining the broader problem, perform more in-depth analyses of various workflows to pinpoint any inefficient or outdated processes. This helps bring into view the specific tasks that RPA needs to achieve for the business. 

3. Gauge Organizational Capacity for RPA 

Assess whether teams have the personnel and resources to implement robotic process automation. Some companies choose to work with RPA vendors, so review departmental budgets to see if the company can afford to purchase RPA tools, software and solutions. 

4. Align Leadership on RPA Goals 

Make sure company leadership is on board with any plans to introduce RPA. Explain what problems RPA can solve for the business, what processes it will be integrated into and a rough outline of what the plan is for testing and tracking the effects of RPA.  

5. Develop a Plan for Implementing RPA 

Establish the finer details for testing and adopting robotic process automation. Decide what personnel needs to be involved in the process, including leaders in IT and HR. In addition, create a plan for communicating RPA implementation to each department with the expected ways it could impact their processes.  

6. Test RPA Strategies 

Introduce robotic process automation on a smaller scale before deploying the full solution. Test how RPA influences an individual process and gather feedback from affected employees to determine if it makes sense to automate more workflows. 

7. Deploy RPA Solutions  

Once an RPA strategy has been tested and received positive feedback, it’s time to fully implement RPA. Frequently communicate with any impacted departments and ensure personnel responsible for overseeing the implementation have ways to coordinate efforts and troubleshoot any issues.   

8. Measure RPA Impact   

Follow a regular cadence for evaluating the impacts of RPA on company processes and establish concrete metrics for tracking its effects. Continually re-evaluating RPA helps teams determine whether it’s achieving its intended goals and adjust the strategy if needed.  

RPA Tools

There’s no such thing as the right RPA tool for all circumstances, and different companies will often find different types of software work best. Some factors that can influence an organization’s decision include the types of technologies an RPA tool can integrate with, data privacy and security measures, orchestration features and the scale on which the organization wants to implement RPA. 

That said, here are some of the most popular RPA tools on the market to date: 

• UiPath 
• Automation Anywhere
• Blue Prism 
• Power Automate 
• AutomationEdge
• IBM Robotic Process Automation 
• Pega 
• Appian 

RPA vs. AI

RPA automates routine, programmatic tasks by mimicking human actions with bots. It uses structured data and step-by-step rules to complete simple tasks with speed and accuracy. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, uses unstructured data to develop its own logic and perform complex decision-making and analysis. 

“I think of AI as the brains. It can figure out complex decisions, it can look at large sets of data and extract insights,” Bachenheimer explained. “RPA is the hands on the keyboard” that actually gets things done. 

Still, RPA and AI are “quite complementary” to each other, Glaser said. Integrating artificial intelligence into RPA systems can enhance their capabilities through intelligent automation, allowing businesses to automate more complex processes and derive deeper insights from their data.

For example, a company could use RPA bots to input sales data from an Excel file into a machine learning algorithm, which could then predict what the next three fiscal quarters of sales will look like. Or a retailer can use bots to automate inventory management tasks like processing orders and updating product prices, while an AI chatbot on its website answers customers’ inquiries and provides product recommendations and updates in real time.

Will RPA Replace Humans?

One of the biggest concerns with RPA is its potential for widespread job loss. Indeed, since 2000, automation has phased out some 1.7 million manufacturing jobs. And many white-collar jobs are at risk of being made obsolete now that bots can handle the work on their own.   

But many industry experts insist that an automated future will not be a jobless one. RPA is primarily designed to streamline repetitive, rules-based tasks, allowing employees to focus on more strategic or complicated work that cannot be replicated by a bot. Plus, automation technology is poised to create millions of new roles. 

Ultimately, the future of RPA will likely be one where bots and humans work together to help businesses run more efficiently. And employees should prepare and adapt as best they can.

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