Digital Productivity with RPA

Vienna, 2017-03-15

Since the economical crisis in 2008, administrative processes have to meet serious requirements to reduce costs. The technological developments of  the last three to five years in the area of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have shown a tremendous potential to lower significantly costs of the respective processes.

Why RPA?

Due to the consistent usage of Software robots (softbots), the application of RPA facilitates a degree of automation for repetitive, administrative processes not possible in the past. Softbots are software applications running on virtual desktop environments and simulating physical employee’s interactions. This is especially true for interactions with legacy application systems. Softbots receive structured or unstructured data from preprocessing or scanning systems, process these data according to self or deep learning rule based systems (AI) and forwarding the results (e.g. an accounting record) into existing applications (e.g. ERP-system like SAP) by using the grafical user interface.

What kind of value could be achieved by using RPA?

• Reduce costs of processes by up to 60% compared to existing costs of processes. This implies that costs of processes with RPA are even lower than those achieved through outsourcing agreements in offshore service centers.
• Process runtimes are reduced. Process error rates can also be significantly reduced (human error rates caused by tiring, weakness in concentration, distraction are avoided).
• Governance and compliance requirments can be met in a by far better degree – after auditing the softbot-code, malversations in executing the respective processes can be neglected. All process activities carried out by a softbot are logged and archived. Storage of critical data for the enterprise are consistantly kept in the legacy systems (CRM, ERP, etc.). Auditing activities are simplified and cause lower effort and costs compared to the past.
• Due to low capital expanditure, investment projects show uncompared ROIs already in the first year of usage. Due to the possibility of using existing grafical interfaces, the technical implementation is comparably simple and requires IT ressources only in a low amount.

Wolfgang P. Kalny