Here are some five common myths about RPA that are still around even past 2022 as we are entering into year 2023.
#1: Mis-interpreted as physical robots
One of the more persistent myths is that RPA is a “Physical Robot”. People visualize metal human-shaped robots bent over keyboards, metallic fingers poised to type when they hear the words robotic or robots.
But RPA is software, not hardware. It automates through algorithms, data entry, and clicks, and copy-and-paste activities that humans routinely do at keyboards. Imagine if someone shadowed you through your job and then copied what you did at the computer — or laptop, tablet, or smartphone — to complete a task. That’s RPA. It imitates what you do through software. Now, there’s also intelligent RPA, discussed in Myth #5, which can do much, much more — but also with just software. No hardware involved, ever.
#2: RPA will take away human jobs
What is truly happening is that jobs are getting better. Employees can focus on creative, strategic, and innovative work once they are free of monotonous, repetitive activities. As a result, people are happier with their jobs. According to a Forbes survey, 92% of employees were happier as a consequence of their employers’ RPA activities. Consider how much more you could do if you didn’t have to spend hours on mundane tasks.
RPA has also produced new employment possibilities. Companies are actively looking for employees to assist them with the deployment and administration of RPA, in line with the market’s explosive expansion. Jobs like RPA analyst, RPA developer, and other RPA-related positions are growing in demand.
#3: RPA is expensive
Yes, as with any technology, RPA requires a financial investment. And, as with any investment, you can expect an ROI. Numerous studies have found that the ROI of RPA is much faster and higher than with many other emerging technologies that can take years to return a payoff — if at all.
#4: RPA is merely for cost savings
It is actually a mistake to focus on cost-cutting alone when deploying RPA. That’s because although many organizations embark on their RPA journeys with the hope of saving costs, they quickly realize other, even more, important benefits.
Here’s a summary of some of the other benefits of RPA.
- Improve operational efficiencies. Things move faster with RPA. You eliminate unnecessary tasks and delays from processes.
- Improve employee productivity. Bots automate tasks. Think of them as digital assistants. And as assistants, they bolster employee productivity, sometimes by orders of magnitude, by eliminating the tedious, repetitive work that is the bane of every employee’s existence.
- Eliminate errors. Bots make fewer errors than their human counterparts. They do what they are programmed to do. Processes that are error-prone, because they are boring and repetitive or require a lot of complex keystrokes or involve calculations that humans have to make on the fly, are performed flawlessly every time.
- Enhance customer service quality. Whether you are serving internal or external customers, they’re much more satisfied getting faster, errorless results from their queries if bots automate even some of the processes involved. And since bots can aggregate all the information for agents, customers don’t have to answer the same questions many times, making them even happier with your service.
- Increase compliance. Because you get an error-free record of everything that is done — in most cases, with access to automated reports that document all bot activities — you don’t have to worry about complying with internal, industry, or government regulations.
Myth #5: RPA is just for simple rule-based tasks
So far, the discussion has been about traditional RPA. But that is just the beginning of your RPA journey. By melding together artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing, you get intelligent automation, which allows you to do end-to-end business process automation and automate much more complex tasks.
Intelligent automation is capable of automating virtually any business process (front office / back office) and even orchestrating work across combined teams of bots and humans. What this means is that intelligent automation can take structured and unstructured data, analyze it, make decisions based on it, and also learn from it — so the more data it ingests, the better it gets at its job. This is different from vanilla RPA, which can only process structured data in highly organized, prescribed steps. Unstructured data capable of being processed by intelligent automation includes human chat conversations, audio, video, and social media, which greatly expands RPA’s scope.
Intelligent automation can provide advanced analytics to aid in the acquisition of operational and business intelligence. It can provide insight into your Digital Workforce’s efficiency and effectiveness, as well as measure the operational performance of your business processes. It can disclose what is significant and forecast what is to come.
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