The practical upshot of robotic process automation is that organizations are able to eliminate a lot of manual tasks. This frees people to focus on more high-value work that is hard to automate, bringing human touches to solving problems and complex customer interactions.
It turns out that these are some of the primary goals of broader enterprise digital transformation. For this reason, many organizations today are looking at RPA and digital transformation strategies to see how they complement each other. However, RPA is not a substitute for digitizing your business and improving your customer experiences. Organizations should use RPA for interim solutions while larger transformation efforts move towards completion.
Why RPA can be a good starting point for digital transformation RPA evolved from several different technologies. One was automated testing tools that simulated people performing work to ensure that systems worked. Another was the enterprise content management universe, where firms needed to extract data from incoming forms, both scanned and otherwise electronically delivered. Like RPA, those tools excelled at taking information from one system and automatically moving it into another system, rapidly and reliably. The RPA products of today are very much like macros in Excel, except free from the confines of the spreadsheet. The latest tools allow people to record their actions without worrying about how to explain to the RPA software exactly what steps to take. Users can subsequently go in and fine-tune the recorded process as necessary. The goal is simple: to eliminate repetitive, manual tasks. When deploying RPA, organizations should find those tasks and automate them. Many users have reported a reduction in errors and the time spent on the tasks. Organizations can typically realize positive results within weeks, freeing up resources immediately for other efforts.
Why RPA is not enough for digital transformation RPA sounds great, but there is one problem. RPA treats the symptom and not the cause of information disconnects. It automates a manual task of moving information between different systems. It doesn't automate or digitally transform a process. If anything changes in the interfaces used in the script, the bot will break. This includes changes to the authentication methods. The question organizations need to answer is, "Why aren't systems sharing information already?" Robots run on a schedule, so data supplied to systems by RPA can't be updated automatically. RPA works well for the vast majority of actions but can be challenged to handle exceptions. In reality, systems need to communicate directly.
