RPA, along with IoT, is the critical lever of modernization and process improvement. The combined technologies contribute to the digital transformation journeys of businesses.
This article dissects what RPA is, its use cases, and how it perfectly complements IoT technologies’ characteristics to help companies boost efficiency and drive higher profitability.
The term’ digital transformation’ has been creating a buzz in our world for a while now and it is primarily based on new digital technologies that allow businesses to improve their productivity, flexibility, and responsiveness in markets with global competition.
This happens through shorter production lead times allowing businesses to bridge the gap between supply and customer demand faster. Digital transformation has taken precedence far and wide, as evidenced by the following figures:
• The digital transformation market is expected to grow to $3.3 billion by 2025. • 40% of executives agree that digital transformation has improved their operational efficiency. • 44% of all companies have already adopted a digital-first business strategy, and 89% of them plan to do so.
Industry 4.0 comprises many considerable innovation families, among which both Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are considered essential levers of process improvement and modernization.
It refers to a technology that can mimic human activity to perform repetitive, high-volume tasks quickly and with 100% accuracy. When coupled with IoT devices, RPA can respond automatically to data insights and perform tasks without being prompted.
Another advantage of using RPA software is that businesses can deploy it without learning new tools, asking IT teams for support, or entirely changing their underlying IT infrastructure, which could be extremely tedious and, of course, mighty expensive.
From insurance and banking to healthcare and supply chain, RPA has significant applications (just like IoT) concerning bringing costs down, streamlining processes, and enhancing interactions with customers.
Let us take a closer look at the role RPA plays in today’s rapidly digitizing world but first, let us take a step back and understand the underlying issues.
Challenges faced by IoT in transforming the digital world
The IoT ecosystem presents manifold opportunities for industries across sectors. However, there remain specific fundamental challenges to implementing it on a broad scale. These include:
As of today, many IoT development solutions remain poorly designed and come with complex configurations. IoT engineers also have limited resources when it comes to implementing and managing these systems, which hinders their maturity as a business process.
There is also a significant lack of authorization and standardization for IoT devices, including poorly defined auditing processes. There are no standard protocols for responses to incidents, which often leads to delays as engineers try to figure things out ad hoc.
Centralized systems are sufficient to handle multiple connected nodes up to the hundreds or even the thousands. However, in large IoT networks, up to millions of devices are connected at once and that can put a lot of load on the infrastructure.
It thus requires significant expense to build servers large enough to handle this load, and even then, we might see frequent server downtime.
An alternative would be to decentralize IoT networks, but this has its challenges concerning the division of functions and how to decide which devices/mini-networks are authorized to be part of the network.
This remains one of the biggest obstacles to widespread IoT acceptance, as more connected devices mean more scope for hackers to breach systems. This is especially true in cases where security protocols are not clearly defined.
Given that cybersecurity breaches have been on the rise for a while, companies will be all the more reluctant to adopt systems that facilitate breaches.
