Supporting digital transformation with RPA

What do we mean by digital transformation?

According to research by Gartner, digital transformation is the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new business model.

C-level executive teams across all industries are using digital technologies to change operational processes, customer relationships, sales and service. Hence given it is a technology that is capable of improving business outcomes, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can support digital transformation.

Industries such as insurance, finance, legal and manufacturing are using RPA to automate high volume, cumbersome and repetitive tasks. These include, but are not limited to, activities such as order and claims processing, invoicing and payment activities, human resources processes, customer onboarding and tax return application. RPA is helping organisations reshape the way they operate and their level of responsiveness at most touch points within the value chain.

But how does all this lead to digital transformation?

RPA is one of the technologies that is best able to help all functions within organisations to evolve with digital transformation. Given RPA’s capabilities, organisations are able to tackle extensive operational challenges, such as executing these large amounts of back-office activities. Furthermore, with the Big Data analytical capabilities provided by RPA, organisations can gain knowledge about their business patterns and the performance of their workflows. Companies can then make use of this information to implement digital strategies, which help adjust their processes to be more efficient. As well as supporting digital transformation, RPA also makes achieving the transformation quick and straightforward.

RPA software robots are taught to impersonate employees’ actions from simple clicks and copy and paste tasks to more complex activities such as bank reconciliations. By actioning the tasks like a human employee would, RPA is able to work with various systems such as ERP, legacy and other external systems without the need to invest further in existing platforms, allowing implementation to happen within weeks and sometimes even days.

By removing these back office tasks, teams can focus on higher value activities such as customer care, sales and marketing resulting in improved customer experience and finally higher customer retention. RPA can help organisations to improve business performance and results - in other words, digital transformation.