Generally speaking, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) provides a means to efficiently and effectively automate support for repetitive manual activities -- most importantly, systemic interactions across multiple enterprise systems. As an enabling technology, RPA can bridge the gap between legacy applications and next stage automation in the supply chain. Consider RPA as your “work horse”-- providing the means to automate much of the back-office, repetitive (often thankless) tasks and manual integrations between legacy applications and customer support operations that currently consume a great deal of labor.
It seems that we are on the cusp of a great disruption in the market that has reached a tipping point driven by business' need to maintain their operations while also responding to pandemic disruption. In some ways, a significant unintended benefit opportunity was driven by the pandemic. Especially impacted by recovery activities are supply chain legacy systems and customer support activities where the ability to quickly automate disparate systems interactions across multiple applications is most compromised.
RPA provides the opportunity to introduce automation in these areas that are labor intensive and made up of repetitive tasks that, in the past, have required increased human labor to address.
With RPA, these repetitive manual tasks can be automated quickly and efficiently to allow the human labor to focus on tasks that require more thought and interaction to complete, in other words higher value tasks in the business.
Perhaps the greatest value provided by RPA is the ability to automate tasks in a continuous improvement process that encourages refinement and extension of task automation supporting your digital enablement objectives. This is important because the automation opportunity can change after the initial results are analyzed. Following this approach to the RPA enablement encourages a quick response with then refinement and expansion of your automation opportunities. RPA provides a low cost, robust and safe introduction to automation that will help the business identify and even validate the digital enablement strategy.
With RPA, business can quickly and efficiently support waves of disruption that continue to impact the market, along with the many requirements growing out of the recovery from the year-long pandemic. By automating repetitive, manual interactions, business can overcome labor limitations, improve employee job satisfaction and respond faster to consumer changing demands.
Contributor Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies. He offers a regular post on Linkedin.