Best Robotic Process Automation Use Cases For All Industries

In this digital era, increased businesses and industries are automating their workflows and operations. As for some industries who think automation is a costly effort, they are witnessing early adopters of robotic process automation outperform the rest of the organizations with an increased ROI and also round-the-clock work at reduced costs.

According to a recent Forrester Report, RPA will be worth $2.9 billion by 2021. RPA is a technological breakthrough for industries as they automate the entire business workflows efficiently.

Top Use Cases Of RPA Implementation

Robotic Process Automation allows industries to automate tasks across various systems. An industry that implements RPA can automate its entire workflow, infrastructure, and other backend processes, which are mostly labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Industries of all sizes can automate their tasks with robotic process automation that completely eliminates the risks of human errors. Let us walk through the key use cases of RPA implementation in various industry verticals:

RPA In Telecommunications

RPA In Telecommunications

Speed, cost and technology are the three key factors when it comes to a telecommunications company. Telecom companies can take advantage of RPA in the following key areas:

Improved Productivity and Scalability

The ability to handle large volumes of data makes the robotic process automation the best suitable go-to-market strategy for the telecommunications industry. Being able to automate back-office processes eliminates the need for employees to perform redundant tasks and focus on other critical tasks.

First Call Resolution Benefits

RPA enables software bots to rapidly access data, thus helping the telecom agents address the customer demands on their first call without having to perform repeated follow-ups. RPA promotes FCR rates thus ensuring customer retention and loyalty.

Cost Reduction

The major cost reduction involved with implementing RPA in telecom is that the RPA software license can be used for multiple processes. The implementation cost is also not as high as that for ERP or Business Process management. Automating tasks also leads to increased ROI.

RPA In Banking

RPA In Banking

Incorporating RPA  saves labor and operational costs in banks. It also reduces errors and human tasks significantly. For instance, the processing cost reduces to 30% to 70% by reducing the turnaround time with banking automation via RPA technology. The banking sector can leverage RPA in the following ways:

Improved Customer Service

From customer on-boarding, verifying customer details to account and loan inquiry, RPA helps banks reduces the turnaround time. This helps banks retain their customers and maintain customer loyalty.

Automated Accounts Payable and Closure Processes

The Traditional process of AP involves gathering invoices from vendors using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), validating the data in the fields thus provided and then processing it. RPA automates this entire process and credits the amount automatically to the vendor’s account.

RPA also sends automated notifications to customers prompting them to furnish necessary documents and processes account closure functions with 100% accuracy.

Enabling KYC And Compliance In Banks

Statistics show that certain banks invest in KYC compliance figures that are close to $384 million every year. RPA is used to gather customer information, validate and process it. Fewer FTEs and round-the-clock functioning improve productivity and the quality of the compliance process.

Credit Card And Mortgage Processing

RPA speeds up the credit card dispatching process by automated background checks and validation based on given rules and procedures. As with mortgage processing, banks have to perform several scrutiny checks such as employment and credit history, etc. RPA implementation speeds the entire process based on well-defined algorithms.

Fraud Detection

Potential frauds are identified before-hand with the advent of RPA. Automating has led to banks being able to identify accounts that are likely to cause threats and flags them. Banks can thus scrutinize these accounts and initiate fraud investigation.

RPA For Customer Care

Amongst the industries embracing RPA benefits, the customer care industry is no exception. When it comes to rule-based redundant work, robotic process automation can be relied upon by BPOs. The different RPA use cases in customer care are as follows:

Automated Data Exchange

Customer care executives operate in a data-driven world. Critical data about customers is gathered and insights are drawn from it. RPA automates the entire process and helps save time and costs by serving their customers better and faster.

Cost Control

 According to the Institute of Robotic Process Automation, adoption of RPA reduces operating costs by 25-50%. Operating costs are reduced with RPA implementation by allocating redundant tasks to these software bots. This also helps outsourcers and clients to improve sales.

Accurate and Differentiated Workflows

With very less human intervention, the workflows are accurate and are performed at a fast pace. Leaving repetitive tasks to be performed by the software bots, there is a minimum number of the workforce engaged in the process. This not only brings more accuracy but also avoids additional costs and saves time.

Offering differentiated and customized services to customers can be obtained by implementing RPA in industrial operations. This helps to maintain customer loyalty.

RPA In Insurance

RPA In Insurance

Collecting important data and automating repetitive tasks is essential for the insurance industry. For ensuring a better customer experience, the insurance industry makes use of the following RPA use cases:

Processing Claims

Studies have shown that processing claims using RPA processes it 75% faster than the traditional approach. Paper-based processes are eliminated by RPA which improves the quality and accuracy of the entire process.

Form Registration Process

Insurance automation with RPA speeds up the form registration process by 40%. RPA with artificially intelligent systems reduces the workload significantly and ensures customer satisfaction.

Regulatory Compliance Updates Made Simpler

Insurance firms rely on several compliance standards and policies. For instance, the HIPAA privacy rules and PCI standards can vary and banks can help their clients stick to these compliance standards by making use of automated notifications and updates using RPA strategies.

Risk Mitigation

RPA allows risk mitigation via RPA by being able to accurately process data automatically from both internal as well as external sites. This ensures delivery of work at a faster pace and with 100% accuracy.

RPA In Healthcare Industries

With the growing volume of patients, healthcare industries are prioritizing on cost reduction and efficiency as two major benefits of RPA implementation in healthcare services. The key RPA use cases in healthcare are as follows:

Savings on Human Workforce

Replacing the workforce that performs mundane and repetitive tasks can be replaced with RPA implementation. This helps the workforce from spending time on core activities rather than perform intense and mundane tasks.

Increased Throughput With Improved Quality

Healthcare personnel can now tackle the large volume of patients, especially in providing individual care and attention. Maintaining medical records of patients, entry processing, claim processing, etc are automated with lower costs via RPA implementation.

RPA In Manufacturing Industries

Robotic process automation has made manufacturing companies shift their production units to automated software bots. Assembling of products, quality checking and packaging and back-end processes have obtained a 40% savings in operational costs via automation. The major use cases are as follows:

BOM Made Simple

The Bill Of Materials with the list of raw materials for new product creation provides detailed information. Leveraging RPA makes product creation faster and ensures accurate and timely creation.

Data Migration

Unlike traditional data migration, implementing RPA provides proper planning and execution of moving data from old to new systems, ensuring cost and time savings.

ERP Automation

Planning of resources is made easier with RPA implementation. Managing Inventory, Accounts Payable, Receivable, and other reports are generated automatically.

Apart from these key areas, other industries that leverage robotic process automation strategies are as follows:

RPA In Finance

Managing customer accounts, creating various reports, migrating data between accounts, updating loan and mortgage data, etc are major applications

of RPA in the finance sector. RPA helps financial services meet compliance standards with changing rules.

RPA technology is accurate and hence implementing RPA in financial services provide significant risk reduction. Faster RPA cycles enhance finance processes, is highly scalable and rapidly deployable.

RPA In Property Management

Property owners are able to manage their property units systematically with RPA. Automated processes help property owners reduce the turnaround time, improve the efficiency of business processes, and save costs.

RPA In Retail Sector

RPA provides the retail industries with solutions such as automatic inventory monitoring, email sales, extraction of critical information from manufacturer websites, etc.

RPA In Information Technology Industries

From employee onboarding, due diligence, payroll processing, task tracking to CRM updating, leveraging RPA in the Information Technology sector can benefit by automating the highly repetitive tasks. Additionally, it helps in saving costs and time.

Need a step-by-step guide on how to implement RPA to your business for positive outcomes? Call our experts right away to learn more about RPA for your industry!

The Future Of InfoPath & SharePoint Forms

What’s The Future Of InfoPath?

Yes, Microsoft has decided to discontinue InfoPath which worked mostly on top of SharePoint and replaced it with a more cross-platform-ish alternative called PowerApps. However, Microsoft will keep supporting InfoPath till 2026, but there won’t be any updates to the core product such as feature additions. In this article, we are discussing the future and transitioning of Infopath into PowerApps and what is on hold for its users. 

What Is InfoPath Used For?

In SharePoint hosted environments, InfoPath is used as a form creation and data capturing tool which was capable of gathering data from multiple sources like XML, web services and databases.

For companies or institutions, it was an easy way to gather structured data from many sources. The basic premise of Microsoft launching this in 2000 was to enable users to create a variety of forms without actually coding it.

The form creators were provided with options to create business logic, rules and also validate the content in the forms. Without getting into too much detail, the whole process of creating the forms in InfoPath could be summarized into a few steps which are planning, adding templates and layout, adding data connections, business logic, adding access controls and then publishing it. 

What Will Replace InfoPath forms?

InfoPath is slowly transitioning into PowerApps, which is envisaged as a tool that helps create custom business apps on top of the existing Microsoft services like SharePoint, Azure, Office 365 and a lot more. It says in the PowerApps website, “We make it easy to get your data into your apps with more than 200 connectors for many popular cloud services and even your on-premises data”. With many templates and interfaces with a drag and drop approach, designers and/or developers could easily create screens or forms that can perform CRUD operations. 

When InfoPath had specific use cases among its users, what makes the PowerApps an obvious improvement is that it lets you create an entire business application in a very limited amount of time. One area in which Microsoft had a specific focus on is where it took the customization capabilities of Dynamics and brought it within PowerApps. What you need to understand is that whether it is InfoPath or PowerApps, both are meant to be used for internal use. There were built for a replacement for things, for instance, an internal onboarding application, task management, etc. Businesses internally can install a native PowerApp in their phone or PC and launch an internal application from it. Even though it has some business logic, it is not actually meant for much larger applications with lots of logic which typically .Net would support. 

Can PowerApps Replace InfoPath?

Along with all the benefits, there are also some disadvantages too. As far as the app performance is concerned, native apps are much faster as compared to this one. Some developers have even reported a difference in 3-5 seconds in app load time. If you need to run multiple apps at the same time, then PowerApps might not be the right fit for you, especially in mobile environments. However, on the web, you can run multiple apps in the same account. Another important drawback is that being an internally implementable app, the apps cannot be published to the app store or play store. None of these are huge issues and we are sure Microsoft will improve these with the latest updates. 

Migrating InfoPath forms to Power apps

Even though InfoPath is considered as a SharePoint first product, originally, it was not built to work with it. Later on, InfoPath was refitted to suit Sharepoint so that the forms could be easily used whereas PowerApps is an Azure first product. PowerApps require a constant internet connection and this is going to be extremely difficult especially for people who may not have an active internet connection like on-field workforce in industries like construction, delivery, etc. It doesn’t even cache the data offline and then sync it later when connectivity is available. Maybe they would introduce this later on, but it is highly unlikely since they have extended support for InfoPath only till 2026. So for now, it seems the only alternative is to continue using InfoPath and this presents a much bigger problem. 

Now that these older versions are being replaced to support Microsoft’s cloud-first approach, the organizations using InfoPath will need to start looking at alternatives that would suit their requirement. But it is extremely difficult. Why? Because the underlying technology of both these software does not function the same way and hence you need to rebuild most of these forms which are going to be a big bottleneck for most of the old users who have the InfoPath forms especially in local servers. When people move from on-premise SharePoint to SharePoint hosted in the cloud, existing InfoPath forms will just stop working. This worries many existing users and they are looking for solutions. 

Is there a better way to create SharePoint forms without InfoPath?

Knowing that InfoPath is going down the drain in a few years and PowerApps may never have InfoPath like features, it is up to the users to find alternatives. An option that the users can have a look at is ClaySys AppForms.

ClaySys AppForms is a metadata-driven low code development platform that can be used to build forms, workflows, and apps. You can create basic forms for migration from paper forms to electronic forms, to a complex line of business applications using AppForms.

It has all the features of InfoPath and can also be used in a local network. On top of that, the Forms created in AppForms can be connected to varied data sources like SharePoint lists/libraries, SQL Server, Oracle, Web Services, RESTFul Services, SQL Azure, Azure Storage amongst others.

Any functionality created in AppForms is future-proof, as all existing functionality continues to work in future versions of the product.