Process automation with RPA (the future of organisations)

The adoption of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technology has emerged as one of the key technological trends of recent years, and its adoption has grown significantly. Automating processes with RPA is essential for any organisation, since it has the potential to profoundly transform its internal operations by automating highly repetitive tasks.

This technology is becoming increasingly relevant given the growing need for business digitalisation across various industries. Automation is now a critical element for businesses, since it is precisely by automating different processes that companies can achieve greater internal efficiencies and become more operationally effective, ensuring their competitiveness in the market.

By 2025, the RPA market will grow to $5 billion. By the same year, it is expected that 4 million robots will be performing and automating office, administrative and sales tasks.

These statistics underscore the ongoing adoption and growth of technology by companies. This adoption is driven by different factors and motivations, such as the need for business digitisation, increasing demand for operational efficiency, and cost optimisation. According to the same article mentioned above, companies using RPA have reported an average reduction of 60 to 80% in process response times.

Microsoft Power Platform, specifically Power Automate – a cloud automation platform – has been helping various clients across different industries accelerate their digital transformation. This tool automates multiple processes and identifies automation opportunities in applications, websites, chatbots and more

Among the different capabilities the tool offers, one stands out for adopting the use of this technology in your organisation:

Currently, organisations can leverage automation features that combine the best of RPA technology with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The purpose of this functionality is to help organisations automate repetitive tasks such as interpretation and processing of documents, automating invoices received via email to an ERP or extracting insights from a lengthy email. Organisations can scale by automating these tasks, freeing up their employees’ time for more complex tasks that add greater value to the organisation.

For this example, the flow is straightforward: the first step begins with receiving documents in an email inbox. The documents are analysed by AI Builder using a model created and trained specifically for this purpose. After this analysis, if necessary, the information can be validated by an employee to ensure there are no errors, and on approval this information is then entered into the organisation’s system. Finally, you can always track and monitor the process to ensure that all steps happened correctly.

Image 1: Document automation flow (source: Microsoft)

Power Automate is a key product for automating different processes within organisations. It natively integrates with the Microsoft ecosystem and, through connectors, integrates with products and services outside of this ecosystem. As such, organisations can build automated workflows that connect multiple applications, data and services, to improve efficiency.

With the advantage of extracting data and insights through AI, namely from Copilot, Power Automate empowers different teams to simplify complex business processes.

For organisations, the benefits of implementation are many:

• Increased efficiency and productivity: automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks allows employees to focus on higher value tasks;
• Scalability: these are scalable technologies, so they can be adjusted to handle increased workloads, without significantly increase resources or costs;
• Cost reduction: when routine tasks are automated, organisations can reduce operational expenses associated with errors and rework; and
• Improved customer experience: automation accelerates response times and ensures that information provided to customers is accurate and correct, positively impacting the customer experience.

There are many arguments we could share to start revolutionising your organisation’s internal processes today and say why, if you are not already, you should start paying attention to how this space is constantly evolving.

RPA technology is indeed an essential component for companies to modernise and remain competitive in the increasingly digital economy in which we live.

If you are considering adopting this technology or simply want to understand the potential of RPA to revolutionise your company’s agility and productivity, talk to us.