Overview
Understanding RPA
Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a software robot or bot that automates human interactions involving keyboard actions and mouse clicks, including fetching, and entering data from various digital systems, navigating systems, and operating systems. Bots can help manufacturing companies achieve productivity gains, to perform routine, rules-based service processes. These can be used even by non-technical employees to configure and solve automation challenges.
Figure 1: Capturing the essence of robotic process automation
In the manufacturing sector, not only can back-office operations such as finance be automated but robotics can also be used in supply chain. Customer service, complaints, and employee hiring can also be automated. 1 Other repeatable tasks such as transferring data from multiple input sources such as email/spreadsheets to ERP can be automated too. Rule-based tasks used to carry out various business processes can be automated, although unattended processes (without human intervention) are more frequently automated.2
A growing space
In India, spending on RPA is doubling every year. The RPA market is anticipated to grow at a compounded annual growth rate or CAGR of above 20% between 2019-2025. Most organizations are witnessing an increase in the adoption of automation in real time along with new use-cases being developed daily. For example, a manufacturing company in the edible oils business has implemented RPA for their contract and sales order management process while another one is implementing RPA to automate the salary processing of its employees. In yet another case, a company has automated the process to seek input tax credit on air travel for its employees.3
Benefits galore
Clearly, manufacturing companies have discovered the benefits and are increasingly turning to RPA for agility and cost savings across the value chain.4 IDC research shows that over 80% of medium sized and large businesses have put digital transformation as a strategic goal, and adoption rates of robotic process automation is forecast to grow by 57% in India in 2023.5 Enterprises are deploying RPA solutions with minimal business impact to improve accuracy, speed-up business operations, and reduce operational costs. RPA is also core to the Business 4.0 transformations, which facilitate automation and accelerate digital transformation and growth.
[1] Toward the Bot Economy: Taking Robotic Process Automation to the next level
[2] The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q4 2019
[3] RPA helping governments and enterprises
[4] Automation enables Indian organizations to wade through logistics issues exposed by covid19
[5] IDC Research