What is RPA and why is it Important?

 

Business processes across domains are becoming more comprehensive, complex, technology-driven, and cost intensive. Managing such processes entails giving proper focus and time and making employees more productive and efficient. It calls for replacing repetitive manual tasks with automation courtesy Robotics Process Automation (RPA). Here, processes are automated using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, thereby facilitating streamlined operations and deriving minimal costs, reducing scope of error, and better profitability. Even so market predictions for the usage of RPA seem to touch $1.89 billion in 2021, which is a phenomenal increase of 19.5% from 2020.

Further, the growth is expected at a CAGR of 34% by 2027 (Gartner). It is a given that RPA has transformed businesses by eliminating or minimizing human intervention in routine rule-based jobs, thereby achieving significant levels of ROI. If repetitive manual processes take about 10% to 25% of the employees’ time, robotics process automation changes that by automating most of such processes (around 70% to 80%). This allows employees the bandwidth to focus on more value-added jobs. Let us find out what RPA is all about.

What is Robotics Process Automation or RPA?

Robotics Process Automation, or RPA, aka Software Robotics, is about leveraging automation technologies to automate mundane back-office operations usually done by human operators. These operations may include creating test cases, extracting data, maintenance of records, filling forms, answering queries, or performing calculations, and much more. One area where RPA has left its mark is in the creation of automated test cases, or should we say, RPA testing. Governed by structured inputs and business logic, enterprise RPA can help businesses to interpret applications for carrying out a host of activities. These include manipulating data, processing transactions, communicating with other digital systems, and triggering responses.

Business process automation scenarios involving the use of RPA include generating an automatic email response to deploying bots to automated tasks in an ERP software application. In fact, CIOs and COOs are increasingly interested in transforming business processes without increasing staffing or costs Surprisingly, RPA supports not only most applications such as Java, .NET, or HTML, but also systems such as SAP, Oracle, or Mainframe. RPA does not depend on coding but leverages artificial intelligence to streamline workflows, increase compliance, enhance quality, minimize errors, and boost productivity, efficiency, and profitability.

How does RPA enable business transformation?

The enterprises of today have adopted digitization to meet a host of objectives, including greater competitiveness, customer-centricity, and profitability. Testing software applications through automation has become highly sought after in the Agile-DevOps driven application development process. RPA software testing have emerged as useful tools for businesses to garner a range of benefits, as mentioned below:

Error-free operations: Robotic process software testing helps businesses to eliminate costly mistakes or errors, especially the ones leading to poor decision making and analytics. RPA helps enterprises to become efficient and precise in conducting operations by eliminating errors. It allows businesses to address customer queries in a hassle-free manner.

Offer automated responses: Robotic test automation offers scheduling capabilities and responds to events automatically, thereby minimizing response time and delivering superior customer experiences. Since robots can work tirelessly without taking breaks, they do not make customers wait for their queries to be answered.

Better precision and compliance: As robots can be engineered to follow specific workflows, better precision and compliance can be achieved, and human errors can be eliminated or minimized. RPA also allows for conducting audit trails in order to solve queries and track progress.

Minimal coding: Since RPA does not always need a developer or tester to configure the drag-and-drop features, it makes it possible to have non-technical workers as part of the project.

Better communication: Businesses can apply RPA to make changes in documents and replicate the same elsewhere in other materials. RPA QA services can enable seamless, quick, and error-free testing of software code, thereby making the process more flexible, scalable, and efficient. Also, the process ensures the quick dissemination of information to every project stakeholder in a simple and unambiguous manner.

Better flexibility and adaptability: Using RPA for testing for testing can allow more flexibility in business operations. Besides, these can be deployed in different environments where dynamic changes are the order of the day without setting up the APIs.

Higher cost savings: With RPA implementation, the workload of employees can be reduced, thus allowing them to focus on other high-priority areas.

Conclusion

RPA does not disrupt existing systems and allows bots to perform crucial tasks such as building deep integrations when there isn’t any API or resources. The technology can be leveraged to optimize operations with respect to customer relationship management, fraud detection, warehouse management, managing audit requests, processing claims, and verifying information, among others. 

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Article Source: medium.com