How Robotic Automation can help in your digital transformation journey

Robotic Automation, a forward-looking software design technology, has been a buzz word for quite some time but only a few industry leaders fully appreciate the potential of this technology. Robotic Automation enables organizations to digitally transform and automate mundane rules-based business processes/manual work by bridging the gap between different legacy systems. RPA implementation helps organizations to streamline business operations and reduce costs.

Many organizations have large volumes and highly transactional processes functions as part of their daily operations which consumes a lot of time for their employees. These processes are usually simple or medium complex, primarily driven by defined business rules where human decision making or judgment is not required. These process functions are tedious and error-prone as employees must navigate through multiple legacy interface systems, which are expensive to/cannot be integrated, to fetch the data. Inaccurate data leads to rework thereby increasing the operating costs for the organization.

Forrester, a leading market research company, forecasts the RPA market to skyrocket to $12 billion by 2023 from merely $250 million in 2016. This is because RPA’s applications are boundless. RPA platforms help create bots that interact with several legacy software applications and mimic humans to automate repetitive work.

What Pega’s RPA solution has to offer?

Pega’s Robotic Process Automation can help organizations to automate volume heavy manual process functions thereby eliminating the need for users to rummage through different legacy systems and hence making the operations error-free, saving on operational costs, and giving more time to employees to work on productive work.

Pega provides two different categories of Automations—Robotic Desktop Automation (refereed also as Attended Automation) and Robotic Process Automation (referred also as Unattended Automation).

Attended automation are typically targeted towards front office/operational activities where it is not possible to automate the end to end business process. In such cases the Attended bots work along-side agents in assisting them to fetch information from multiple applications, improving productivity and quality of agents work. Attended bots will have to triggered by the agents in need basis, provide agents with realtime process inputs, and automates routine activities within the processes in a fast and accurate manner. Attended bots can run on agents’ workstations or on the cloud.

Unattended automation is used to fully automate high volume, repetitive, frequent, and simple processes/activities where the tasks can be defined as step by step business rules. As the name suggests these bots are not supervised or supported by humans and they operate in the background. Once programmed, these bots can be scheduled or triggered based on some defined events and normally used to perform batch or bulk operations. Unattended bots can run on dedicated workstations, cloud, web, or server and can replace work performed manually by users with a fully automated process.

Top use cases/processes across industries where Pega’s Robotic Automation can be used

1. Human capital management

• Talent Acquisition/Recruitment – Bots can help the HR managers to search for the right candidates based on defined parameters. Once the prospect is identified, the bot can automatically fetch the data

• Payroll – Bots can be configured to automatically scrape the data from the timesheets and calculate the pay for employees at the end of each month. They can also generate payslips and send it across to employees in a matter of seconds

2. Insurance

• Insurance Claims: Insurance claim verification and processing is high data-intensive, manual, tedious and lengthy process. RPA can help insurers in automatically retrieving the relevant data from different sources thereby reducing the processing time and hence improving customer experience.

• Premium renewals- Bots can be configured to identify the renewal dates of policies and automatically send reminder emails/trigger an IVR call for renewal of policy without any human intervention.

3. Banking and financial services

• KYC- Know your customer process is a stringent and mandatory regulatory procedure for financial institutions and for most of these FIs the cost of running these checks can be significant. RPA can help in collecting and verifying the data of customers against internal and external systems for record checks.

• Credit Card Processing – Processing time for credit cards can be reduced from days to a few hours by designing Bots to collect customer documents, perform credit checks, and background checks by getting data from various systems and to decide if customer is eligible for a credit card or not.

4. Retail

• Inventory Management – Inventory data is maintained in different systems, software Bots can help in identifying right stocks and push alerts/notifications when there is shortage or overflow.

• Reporting – RPA bots can extract data from sales systems and help business categorize multiple reports based on products, categories, regions etc. BOTs help in saving countless hours of manual work in preparing these reports for monthly or quarterly analysis

5. Health care

• Medical Billing – Billing process by healthcare providers is a multi-step process that involves the use of billing codes for each procedure, processing with the insurance provider, and calculating the out of pocket expenses. This requires collaboration and data collection with internal and external stakeholders. Software bots can automate this process and hence reduce the time for generating the bills.

• Discharge Instructions – RPA Bots can ensure that the Discharge instructions are accurately provided for each patient and provide reminders for pick up of medical reports, medicines, and upcoming appointments

Attended and unattended bots have unique benefits and the combination of both makes a holistic RPA solution for an organization. Unattended bots free up employees’ productive time from manual & repetitive work, on the other hand, attended bots help employees perform other tasks in an organized way. Hence both bots together add up to create a perfect value proposition to digitally transform operations for the organization.