What Is Rpa And Its Benefits For Businesses?

These may entail automating their operational workflows to improve efficiency and accelerate processes. However, implementing an automation software is not easy, for it requires the input of a humongous quantum of data into the software for further processing, transfer, analysis, and management. Since many existing software used by businesses are not compatible with APIs, the task of entering data is done by the employees themselves. This negates the whole purpose of automating the system i.e., to accelerate the process and reduce costs. This is where Robotic Process Automation or RPA can be of help by becoming the interface between manual and automated data entry. It can take the job of capturing and entering data into the automated system.

So, what is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

RPA is a software that does iterative and rule-based tasks like logging into applications, entering huge quantum of data, and sending emails, among others by simulating the work of humans. It is akin to a robot watching you execute the above-mentioned tasks and then mimicking the same at speeds you can barely imagine. Besides carrying out the above-mentioned activities, Robotic Process Automation can execute tasks like controlling data, interpreting codes, activating responses, and communicating with other systems. And yes, its capabilities can be significantly enhanced by leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The RPA software performs its activities by interacting with the user interface of automation software or by connecting to the client servers or HTML code. It can have wide ranging benefits for businesses and end customers across verticals as mentioned below.

• In insurance, RPA can be used to collect premium information or process claims.
• In HR, it can help in payroll processing, documentation, and joining formalities.
• In finance, the robotic software can facilitate the collection and processing of vendor invoices into the business process management system.
• In logistics, it can gather information and analyze business patterns to predict bottlenecks or disruptions in the workflows. The insights thus obtained can be used to improve the supply chain and end-user experience.

As businesses aim to achieve faster time to market with top quality products or services, quality assurance has taken centre stage. It involves implementing automation across the operational workflows to minimize errors and optimize processes. This needs something beyond Agile delivery such as employing robotic test automation to derive better accuracy, shorter turnaround time, and higher efficiency. Businesses prefer to implement RPA robots that encompass a plethora of applications, technologies, and components running on multiple operating systems. This necessitates an end-to-end robotic process software testingusing open source automation tools like Selenium.

Why do you need RPA?

Businesses need RPA to achieve the below mentioned outcomes.

• Enhanced Quality: An RPA robot software can work non-stop by following established business logic and rules to offer enhanced services. It is reliable, efficient, and delivers 100% accuracy. When businesses look at obtaining deliverables that are qualitatively superior and accurate, the RPA software can be the best fit.
• Better customer experience: This follows from the earlier outcome of enhanced quality. RPA transforms the quality of products by removing glitches that cannot be identified by employing manual means.
• Cost savings: Software robots aka RPA can take up iterative tasks thus helping businesses to deploy costly resources elsewhere where they can excel and add value. Moreover, automating tasks can lead to significant cost saving in terms of increased productivity.
• Better control over processes and deliverables: RPA helps businesses to retain their core or non-core work in-house and do away with human errors or inefficiencies that outsourcing can entail. It helps to exert better control of the end-to-end workflows.
• Easy scalability: If your business needs to perform extra tasks that the RPA software is not able to handle, just increase the number of bots. RPA creates an ecosystem wherein it becomes easier to scale operations that are commensurate with your growing business.
• Audit compliance: RPA can provide comprehensive information on business analytics leading to better audit compliance.

Conclusion

The implementation of RPA and RPA testing solutions can help businesses to enhance the capability of their IT systems thereby deriving high-end performance. By reducing the end-to-end testing effort, RPA software testing can bring about high scalability, reliability, functionality, security, and stability - at reduced costs.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified.