Creating an Intelligent and Connected Digital Workforce

Recent technological advances have made it possible for companies to automate more of their workflow than ever before. According to a 2017 study, IT decision makers believe that 59 percent of business processes could be automated by 2022.

The benefits of automation are as extensive as the issues with manual processes. By automating more of your tasks and workflow, your IT processes will become significantly faster—not to mention more accurate, predictable, and regulated.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the technology that can help you build a “digital workforce”: an interconnected team of software “robots” that work together in harmony with your human employees.

The advantages of RPA include:

• Integrating your disparate enterprise data under a single platform.
• Freeing up your employees’ time from repetitive manual tasks, so that they can focus on higher-level strategic thinking.
• Vastly reducing the amount of human error present in your workflow.
• Accelerating your processes in order to match the fast-paced business landscape, become more competitive with your rivals, and better serve your customers.

Fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, RPA robots can perform a variety of actions that were previously restricted to humans: sending emails, browsing the web, and interacting with productivity applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. RPA is suitable for activities ranging from sales and supply chain management to finance and customer service.

What’s more, RPA can sit on top of your existing workflow, rather than forcing you to re-engineer all of your processes. Because RPA agents can pull data from a variety of business sources, you can start benefiting from advanced AI-enabled insights right away.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of RPA is that it’s not restricted to your technical employees alone, like previous IT projects. Business users can easily create and configure RPA robots without having to write a single line of code.

Businesses of all sizes and industries stand to gain a lot from implementing RPA. Consulting firm McKinsey and Company reports that the return on investment for new RPA projects ranges from 30 to 200 percent in the first year alone.