Many companies have invested in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to stay competitive in their industry, and they’ve noticed massive returns on their investment with this technology. Due to the unforeseen events that occurred during 2020 and the industry-wide switch to work from home, RPA technology has rapidly evolved and continues to be on an upward trajectory.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when RPA is applied towards finance applications.
Benefits of RPA
Using RPA in your finance operations means you can take advantage of the technology’s resources and gain maximum ROI. RPA should be used to eliminate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, that are rule and process based. This helps to reduce costs and errors, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks that require human intervention. Below are the top five benefits of implementing RPA software for your company:
1) Improvement with internal processes. By leveraging AI and RPA resources, a company can experience faster internal reporting, onboarding and other internal activities.
2) Cost saving. Software robots help to automate tasks and most likely cost less than a full-time human employee.
3) No replacement of your IT systems. RPA use does not require your company to replace your existing systems. Instead, RPA is used to improve your current systems, just like a human can.
4) Enhancing customer satisfaction. RPA can significantly reduce the time spent on identifying customers and deliver better customer service. Customer service can access information faster because of RPA help and minimize the wait time for customers.
5) Lower operation risks. RPA can reduce the number of human errors providing a lower level of operational risk.
2022 Top RPA Trends to Follow
You are likely to see the following RPA trends throughout the rest of the year and into 2022:
A welcome change
RPA’s primary goal is to gain the most out of your team and optimize business processes. If your company has withheld from using RPA, then your company could be at stake of already being behind the curve.
Some companies may argue and say there were issues with implementing RPA into their business and financial applications, which may have scared away other businesses ‘ attempts to invest in the technology. However, the reality is that the availability of qualified and knowledgeable RPA providers is continuously expanding. As more companies accept the change, these issues will become problems of the past.
Greater need for IT
Automation can potentially lead to damaging problems with the fragility of automation, security, and value delivery. However, IT should help with their expertise in the complexities of RPA development. That means there will be a greater need for internal IT teams. IT departments will need to work together with RPA to contribute and successfully install automation dually.
High attention on safety & security
As RPA is used for internal and external processes, security and safety are a top priority, especially when it comes to RPA for finance. Optimization from RPA means businesses will have strong data sets on hand to acquire critical insights. This type of data should be highly protected.
For example, there is a lot of confidential information at play when it comes to financial processes, whether it’s within a financial institution or an accounting and payroll department, protecting customers and employees from hackers and identity thieves is paramount. The security framework for the RPA implementation must meet the highest industry standards and will be relied upon to offer stringent security over sensitive data.
More acquisitions for automation
Keep an eye on the consolidations and acquisitions during the rest of this year and next; it should keep expanding. Automation vendors will push for the usefulness of investing in robotization and will offer the best possible capacities.
Intelligent processes
It’s highly likely that RPA will be more fully integrated with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies moving forward. The differentiation between software bots and digital workers will become more transparent. RPA bots will focus on tasks based on rule-based logged processes. However, AI will help carry out more of the complex tasks like a human may do.
This process will also help combine all automation and attain a fluid process with automation and interconnectivity throughout all departments further integrating and connecting financial departments with other critical areas. The increase in RPA’s cognitive AI app development will help steer clear of bottlenecks. Be aware that can occur if a UI change is not immediately programmed into the processes of a bot to achieve its goals.
Increase of RPA CoE
RPA maintenance and support is a hefty load, and we will see more organizations follow automation best practices and create RPA Centers of Excellence (CoEs). There will most likely be an increase in the growth and popularity of RPA CoEs. These will help standardize and govern RPA to minimize bot errors, maintenance, and lost business value when bots are taken out of production.
Cloud & RPA-based applications
RPA workload will increase in complexity due to RPA scaling and expanding to more cloud-based applications. It will become common to see a bot’s workload sharing across platforms and multi-RPA vendor orchestration.
As companies increase RPA uptime to get the highest value from their bots, RPA ROI will further increase. Benefits will be evident after maximizing the use of RPA.
Focus on RPA uptime
2020 and 2021 revealed that companies that automated more processes did not necessarily mean successful automation. So over the coming year companies will maximize RPA uptime and bot readability to achieve the total expected business value of their automation. This process is likely to focus on analytics dashboards and reporting reports for all automation teams.
RPA will continue to show strong growth
According to mobile app development agency AppStudio, the immediate benefits of RPA may not be readily apparent due to companies struggling with constant repair cycles and automation downtime. When you’re programming a bot for the first time, there is a lot of testing and learning going on. There is no way to speed up this process and accelerate the maturity of your RPA programs, you just need to keep developing your bot until it executes as planned. Given that, a lot of companies have had to be creative with their bot implementation and do more with less.
2021 was known as the year of RPA appropriation. Now, 2022 will focus on getting it right and creating a better design, plan, and automation delivery.
Speak to the experts
It’s essential to keep an eye on these RPA trends. If you need help with the implementation of RPA within your organization, K2 can help make it happen.
At K2 University, we’ve partnered with industry leaders Automation Anywhere to offer RPA Training for Finance Professionals. Our Mastering Bots course offers best practices, certificate guidance, web data management, and chatbot development so you can better serve your customers and employees – find out more.
