RPA and Bots rescues business during COVID-19 crisis

We all are observing an lockdown across different countries due to coronavirus breakout, businesses are closed and people are doing WFH these days. In rare cases, People may find it difficult to be available on time due to various reasons like low connectivity, electricity shutdown, maintenance, etc and collaborating with people at this time makes it more difficult and may hamper the business operations. This makes the business process difficult to streamline and complete. However, here enters the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and BOTS which is available for businesses to utilize, can rescue business operation, streamline it and make them function smoother.

Since, RPA bots are deployed over the cloud and can be trigger at anytime from anyplace, this makes a valid choice for businesses to setup it for most trivial task their company does. We have variety of tools that can be very helpful and remove the dependency with people during these time and are available as a resource and can be scaled at any instance of time. Thus it makes a valid preference to go for it and utilize it in such difficult times.

Lets see what RPA and BOTs can do it for business during these tough times with no human dependencies:

1. Automate the data entry tasks from various sources — This is one of mostly used areas where RPA is deployed to help individuals to collate the data from different sources and push it into the Organizations different systems. This is one of the best advantages one can have implementing RPA into their stack.
2. Automate the daily workflow tasks — Another use-case for businesses where their employee performs different operations like checking the systems record, analyzing them, validating them with other integrated systems and then perform certain actions typically includes some workflow process. This is one of the best place an RPA can be helpful to be available.
3. Automate the invoice processing: This is another area where the RPA tools can be used. Invoice processing involves a lot of integration with different systems and reading information from different data sets. Account department manually verifies every invoice, updates information into the accounting systems and pushes for payment There is a risk of human error which can be easily avoided through RPA. And all this can be done by automation through RPA tools.
4. User Assistance BOTs : This is one of the widely used to assist users for any issues they face. This reduces the workload to the support team and can provide assistance like a human. Most organizations uses it to engage the existing customers however certain companies have leveraged it further to acquire and retain customers by integrating other technologies with it.
5. Employee assistance BOTs: This one can be leverage to provide basic assistance to employee like getting daily statuses, recording attendances, marking leave, etc, using chatbots. This can also include to make them aware about the policies and assist them to claim any expenses they may have incurred.

The above are very limited areas which i have provided however the RPA and BOTs have much more advantages in other business units like order processing, customer service, candidate hiring, and many more. However, all this does comes with a cost. Costs includes high license for RPA tools, IT effort to bring these integration, cloud infrastructure cost, robust business strategy needs to be in place, change within the business.

Thank you for reading this article, I hope you all with your family are staying safe.