Robotic process automation, your business can automate processes and tasks that are typically carried out by your employees. There are several ways to use robotic Process Automation effectively in your business. In today’s podcast, we will go through a couple of business areas to see where RPA is especially useful.

Hello, and welcome to episode great use cases for RPA. With RPA, you can work across different application applications, platforms and departments to automate your business processes and to free up your employees from manual repetitive work.

Also RPA can integrate very well with existing IT infrastructure, and it doesn’t require any additional installations. And the best is that companies don’t have to invest heavily to automate essential processes. And there are several ways to use RPA effectively in your business. And then in the next minutes, we will go through nine use cases. And yeah, with me here is Arno again, Arno with which one, would you like to kick off this, this episode?

I think we should start with the most popular one Sascha, which is customer service, it’s obviously one that’s close to the hearts of many businesses to make sure that your customers are satisfied. Of course, you know, more than customers are very accustomed to quick responses, you know, from customer service centres, because, you know, there’s this, all of these options, these engagement channels that that’s available. So, you know, it is possible using RPA, to deliver these quick results that customers want, you know, from their customer service journey. So, you know, automated customer service assistance, can do all sorts of things for you. So he could sort out initial queries for examples, and an offer initial responses to customers, or were you paying a customer service helpdesk via a chatbot, or sort of any automated route, it could, it could even be using telephony, it’s good to take those queries and really sort that and actually put that to the right department. So detect department could deal with something that that relates to any technical queries, the service department for anything relating to service delivery, and so on, and so forth. And it just really ensures that that the query sort of reach that the right customer care agent for a very quick resolution, rather than sort of transferring calls between, you know, one customer service operative to another. So, you know, a lot of the rules with inside customer service. And the way that the customer service journey is routed, all of those rules are generally predictable. And, you know, according to recent research, I think it was also McKinsey, that this, you know, over 70% of customer services queries are rules based. So you know, these processes can be automated. So it is a really, really good starting point, an excellent use case for RPA. To get started with, you know, just this particular, Customer Service Automation is amazing. 80%. So,  it’s actually for every business who’s currently doing it manually, it’s basically losing a lot of capacities that they could use somewhere else. And, you know, we discussed as well, recently chatbots. And I think combining that RPA with chatbots. I think, yes, this number can potentially go even higher.

Yeah, and I think, sorry, yeah, I think this is also where you see the winners and the losers in this space, where if you look at somebody like Amazon, for example, or somebody like apple, and there’s a lot of other examples as well, you know, their, their customer service journey is extremely effective, it’s very light touch, it generally gets to a resolution very quickly, and it leaves you satisfied. You know, you could debate whether or not the product or the service is affordable or not, but I think, you know, with some of these larger corporations, it almost becomes irrelevant. You know, what, what the service cost and what the product cost. It’s just these value-added services that you know that if there is going to be a problem If you do need to return an iPhone, it is extremely easy to do so. And you know that all is driven by automation and you know that equates them to huge levels of customer satisfaction and levels of satisfaction.

Very interesting. Thank you another one which is really popular and seems like it’s always current sometimes I think okay well what are companies or what have companies done for such a long time that invoice processing is still a big topic for automation, but, but invoice processing is really like a top use case. And I think that probably is because some companies they not always have been around for so many times isn’t it some companies are just had the journey where automation probably starts to make sense for them, because the invoice volume gets larger or maybe there was a merger and acquisition something that suddenly that that there might be a reason, but for some reason it is a very hot use case even was we built something a couple of years ago the intelligent capture cloud just for that sort of purpose to really process that large volume of invoices coming into companies and very often they Yeah, they end up in mailboxes and then will be processed usually manually entered into earpiece systems and so on. So, I think this this large volume of invoice processing very repetitive very manual can delay a lot of payments and because they have been entered maybe incorrectly into the year p system or they not even have entered correctly into the in any kind of system so they sort of lost so this obviously produces a lot of Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of not grief but unhappy suppliers. And this is something you can avoid easily. And yeah, was invoice processing, I think usually the challenges are with the formats of the documents, but now with RPA and combined with AI, you can now extract all this information with from these invoices easily. So you don’t need to be a human employee to just make sense of that invoice invoices are generally quite structured. So as an invoice number is a total there is a VAT number on there. So the system can check on those things very easily and verify that maybe was a purchase order system at the same time was this invoice proper one which is okay to process further or Yes, all that stuff. Now can be done in combination with OCR, and AI and OCR. OCR suddenly is very, very sexy again, around for so many years, but now with RPA OCR is really, really cool. Basically the eyes of the robot going in this new model world. So yeah, I think taking all the data and put this into structured format and validate on that data finding out if there’s some errors, and then processing it end to end really into the systems thing. That’s the power on invoice processing. And if you have huge volume, I think that’s that’s becoming very clear that you’re just wasting a lot of time doing it manually.

Yeah, and you mentioned just from a start-up business that start with invoice, receipt to payment, which is sort of generally called accounts payable. You know, perhaps they start with a shared inbox and from shared inbox, they use an Excel spreadsheet to track it from there on, it gets emailed across to various people to process it, approve it, and then to do the final payment. But I think what we seeing is that even for smaller scale invoices, you know, not even 1000s but I think sort of in the hundreds or even high 10s You know, it is very, very easy to use their stop automation tools. I mean, even something like a UiPath, a tendered robot or even something like power automate, you know, these sorts of things are brilliant at actually looking in shared inboxes identifying document types, which is you know, classification engines that that could say this is an invoice or you know, this this is some other document and then from there string that into your actually feed out into your accounts payable process. So it is it is also, I guess, you know, a lot of people always talk about the volumes. But I think the fact that you can also start with smaller volumes, because, of course, what you would see is increase in accuracy. And you know, and I think sometimes, you know, a lot of people, again, promote the sort of high volume of value transactions by I think that there is there is a case, especially for something like invoice processing, where it should be something that that should be in your business, you know, as soon as possible. Really, again, I think if we discussed this a while ago, as well as if it can, if it can be automated, it definitely should be automated. And I think a start-up or any, any kind of business these days, should have an automation first kind of thinking. That’s what I believe.

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Just never come into that situation that you have to use your valuable capacity on these really tedious admin tasks? And they’re certainly the really rule based ones.

Absolutely, yes. So that brings us to the third use case, for RPI, which I think is quite an important one, which has to do with sales order processing. Now, traditionally, data consistency, you know, with inside enterprise system, is a very tedious task. And to get like a really good consistent data set, and you have scenarios where sales representatives spend a lot of time actually entering this data into a CRM system, and then they go to your P systems enter the data there. So there’s some duplication there. And financial analysts then go and replicate data into perhaps other modules to get some good visibility into reporting. And this results in obviously, a lot of duplication, it’s prone to errors. And, you know, it affects productivity of all of these people that’s involved. So with RPA, you know, we can automate the sales activities end to end by automating the tasks like the sales order entry, for example, or invoice creation, you know, and all of this help to maintain a really good database, where you, you know, remove that duplicate data entries. And, of course, you know, you improve customer experience as well in the process. And you’re also you know, your sales team, you improve their productivity, you going to improve their employee satisfaction, because you’re removing these time-consuming tasks, like double data entry from their day jobs, right. And then they can start to concentrate on, you know, their actual main task, which is, you know, prospecting lead generation, and actually going out to generate more business. Absolutely. I think that’s, that’s a very, very key thing for salespeople is that they want to earn, they want to do more sales to earn more commission, and they don’t really they, I think it was even very early on when we when we introduced CRM, into the sales process, I think is our can’t be bothered to end everything in here. So I just want to get out and do the deals. Clearly, yeah, absolutely. understand them. They shouldn’t really dealing with this with this stuff. Just not the things and that sort of lots of sites, people are like hunting. So this is just happened stuff. They, they, yeah, they will be your best friend if you start automating this.

And I think a lot of good salespeople are quite diligent in maintaining CRM systems and DRP systems. But I think though, it also causes a great degree of frustration. It takes time away from them that could be used selling. And, of course, not everybody is very consistent. So you might have somebody that’s very diligent, that actually sit down and do these double data, they double data entry, but then you’re going to have other people that’s not really interested in it. And also the process breaks down because you’re not you don’t have a consistent process. And of course, that’s where If if you do reports on your, your figures, or you need to go into the CRM system and see what the update is on an account, it can produce, you know, in consistencies if you don’t have a streamlined automated process. So you can remove a lot of headaches from your, your sales process by deploying RPA. And that’s why it made number three on our list.

Fantastic, yeah. So the next one we picked is payroll. So also a very, very time consuming activity, which happens once a month for all the employees of your business. And, again, some organizations This is done really still manually depends really on the company size. But I think we, when we look back in last year, when we when even furlough started, suddenly, payroll got far more complex and it got even more and more time consuming to work out what is the right payroll figure, and how to calculate all that stuff. So it’s just an example how complex payroll can be. And if you if you if, if you have some form of automation in your in your payroll process was RPA, you can just verify that stuff is especially if it’s a lot of workers, you suddenly for example, had on furlough, then I think you could do all this in sort of in a bulk processing and with RPA, and update your systems accordingly. And just make sure it’s all proper and validated. I think without that, things can go wrong. And then I think the big problem is there, if something is wrong, employees will become dissatisfied, that’s dissatisfied really, isn’t it. So if something is wrong with the pay, I think is one of the worst things which can happen. So why payroll automation, and calculating benefits, reimbursements. When they have been on business, travel, all that stuff needs to go in as well, they potentially get some car allowances or expenses paid back. So that needs to flow into payroll. So I think checking all that stuff was different multiple systems in place. I think that’s, I think this is this is a big one, we will probably see more and more coming. Going forward. Yeah, I

think number four on the list, definitely, deservedly. So, use the word employee dissatisfaction, I can think about harsher terms. Rather than dissatisfaction if you if you don’t get your, your salary at the end of the week or the end of the month. But yeah, I think you know, it, it is one of those things where you want to get it right. The numbers needs to be spot on, I think consistency is king. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fully automated payroll, because it is very predictable. And you know, these are, you know, some of the things that as a business, you know, in you know, you you did mention employee satisfaction, dissatisfaction, but yeah, it is a key driver for it. So, the next one, that made up to the top RPA use cases, at number five is price comparison. Now, a lot of businesses out there, that produces products, tend to bulk buy components, and provide these products or services. And, you know, obviously, the cost of these items can impact a company’s revenue or its profits. So, companies always, you know, do research online to, to source these, these products or the other components that goes into their products, and source for the best prices and, and also to make really good informed decisions. So, this research process into, you know, finding the right components to put into your products at the right price is very time consuming and quite complicated. So, and this is one of the reasons why a lot of companies are actually starting to use RPA to automate that research, you know, you can train a bot to be able to go to different then the sites, you know, download price lists, do comparisons automatically, and then make recommendations, you know, and it’s not just comparing prices from these different vendors, but it can also, you know, compare product attributes, its quality. So, so you could really as a business that that manufacturer or something you know, can buy that you know that that best product or the best resource you need. at the best price possible, and you could really automate and streamline that complete process. So that’s a really important one as well for us terms of your use case, and hence why we put it at number five.

Now, I think sometimes there is a bit of a negative word to go into websites and finding that information. I think there is this word scraping coming up, isn’t it? scraping that information was the bottom I think it comes across a little bit negative, but they’re basically that’s this is how we get this information from going through websites and extracting that information that that structured information like these attributes, I think there’s a very interesting project currently we’re working on is it’s all about change, and climate change. So if companies want to purchase stuff, so they could say, Okay, I want to buy this Samsung TV, but that there has a specific set of energy attributes. And just finding somewhere, wherever out there, you need to you need to maybe compare on that energy efficiency going forward. I think that this becomes a topic more and more. And I think this is where the bots can then help as well to help businesses to find the right products to support the climate change agenda. Yeah, that’s even the scraping sounds, sounds maybe a bit negative, but there’s lots of positive and the outcomes. Great.

So I think the next one we picked is storing customer information as a use case. So unfortunately, that’s it again, was this episode of the process and automation podcast. If you liked this episode, please give us a five-star rating. And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast, so you don’t miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time. And until then, let’s automate!