Businesses around the world are adopting RPA technology to strive in this COVID-19 situation. The health of customers and the employees is a top priority. To make work from home possible for the employees, and for easy access to customers, businesses need to automate the tasks. For this, they need to invest in appropriate automation platforms and RPA tools that can carry out tasks without any technical glitches, seamlessly.
Robotic Process Automation i.e., RPA technology enables businesses to design software programs that can emulate and integrate the work of a human to carry out several business processes.
RPA And COVID-19 Challenges
Employees might fall sick and need long leaves to recover. They might not be able to reach the workplace due to government-imposed lockdowns. They might also need to self-quarantine. This can cause severe gaps and delays in providing smooth customer service or in the completion of tasks. These gaps can be resolved by using RPA services.
Software programs or robots remain unaffected by the COVID-19. Robots can work around the clock with high efficiency and the output is error-free. They can process high volumes of data without needing leaves for self-isolation.
While robots perform low-risk repetitive tasks, employees can safely work from home on high-risk unique tasks. This helps in maintaining the social distancing and thereby safeguarding the employee’s health.
It is vital to provide personalized and consistent customer support during these difficult times. RPA powered by AI and machine learning can provide such a user experience.
RPA Improves Remote Work Productivity
Although work from home culture existed pre-COVID-19, that culture became mainstream post-COVID-19. Technological advancements like AI and RPA helped enhance the efficiency of remote work.
It is frustrating to work remotely when the employees can’t immediately turn to colleagues or managers for support. RPA keeps them connected in real life and provides necessary information as required via virtual assistants.
1. Invoice Processing
Organizations have to process invoices in various formats like email, PDF, paper copy. Manually processing all this data is a slow, error-prone and tedious method. RPA and intelligent automation tools help in utilizing bots to automate data input, process it like humans.
2. Document Processing
RPA works with screen capturing technology. It can process the unstructured data from various sources like texts, images, natural language input through scanned documents and PDFs. Therefore, employees can focus on high-value tasks while bots take care of repetitive tasks. RPA is used in banks, accounting, administration, HR, etc.
3. Cybersecurity And RPA
- Cyber threats are a serious issue when the majority of employees are working remotely. RPA and intelligent automation can help the organization combat cyber-attacks and data breaches.
- Cybersecurity operations like access management, vulnerability scanning, patch management, incident management, etc. can be automated.
- For example, the bots can assist an administrator by granting or revoking access to an application when the employee joins or resigns. This prevents data leaks and security breaches.
4. Secure Client Data Access
Keeping the client data secure is crucial when the employees are working from home. The home network is not secure so RPA can be used to automate the process of accessing the sensitive data.
5. Automated Timesheets
When most of the employees are working from home, the HR department finds it difficult to keep track of employees’ timesheets. RPA enables the HR department to manage attendance and active worktime easily. Bots can be programmed to notify the managers regarding absence, prolonged inactive time of employees, break time, etc.
6. Overcoming Pitfalls
Due to the current economic slowdown and unreliable market demand, some organizations were reluctant to invest in new technology like RPA, especially after hearing about failed implementation stories. Employees are also worried about losing their jobs. However, RPA is a non-invasive technology that can be easily implemented without any major changes to the existing architecture.
Having clear objectives, selecting the right process for automation and good communication between all the teams is crucial to ensure that RPA implementation doesn’t fail. RPA is both future proof and cost-efficient. It will show the improvement as soon as the implementation is completed.
Ensuring a smooth transition to RPA enabled business is important. Employees should be assured that RPA augments their work. Change management should ensure that employees whose work became redundant due to RPA are skill trained to utilize their valuable time on more productive tasks. RPA also gives an option to both upscale and downscale the business according to the COVID-19 situation and the current demand and supply.
Conclusion
COVID-19 severely affected the operations of many businesses. The low market demand further aggregated the problems. RPA augmented employees’ productivity in two ways.
- RPA did high volume and low-risk tasks to allow employees to concentrate on more value-generating tasks.
- RPA made work from the home environment more feasible.
Organizations that already implemented RPA are now reaping the benefits. They will consider expanding their RPA implementation in the future. It is necessary to select an efficient RPA software vendor who has an unparalleled understanding and capability to provide a successful RPA implementation and scaling its application.
Even after the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, RPA technology usage will become the new normal. This robust technology will continue to improve business processes. AI-supported RPA tools are being used now but it is still in early stages. High rates of successful implementation of RPA across various businesses and efficient integration with legacy software will be seen shortly.
