RPA: The Future Workforce
The term digital transformation is currently a heavily used expression in businesses, especially when the focus comes to things like reducing cost, developing innovations and implementing next-generation technologies. In the course of initiating changes and reducing the effort of humans, robots play a vital role in the age of the 21st Century. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML) and other fields showing massive growth, businesses are trying to adapt to this change. It is during this course of change that RPA is drawing the spotlight.
Why is RPA being used?
RPA or the Robotic Process Automation is being adopted by businesses throughout the world because of its efficiency and several other advantages. RPA has the ability to carry out tasks at a much faster rate than human workers. This is the reason why most of the manual or semi-manual processes are being assigned to RPA. RPA possesses the capability of carrying out a large number of tasks in a shorter span of time. As this is an automated process, it helps in reducing human errors that arise whimsically. The concept of fatigue and rest can be neglected as it does not matter to robots and work can be faster. This is why, with the help of RPA, more work can be completed. Thus, the process of RPA is far more cost efficient than the same by human labor.
What is a Digital Workforce?
One of the most important components of digital transformation is a digital workforce. Digital workforce can be defined as the replacement of human labor with some kind of digital component or technology. To have a better view of the term, it can be said that a digital workforce does not eliminate the human element completely. The motive of this idea is to have advanced technology and tools in place to offload repetitive tasks from humans and engage those people by introducing them to some more interesting work where they can apply their creative ability and skills.
Things to Keep in Mind while Operating RPA:
If any individual is a part of a stable and long-term strategy, it is important to have a center of excellence (COE) and its steering committee in place, which helps in providing structure when it comes to defining processes and deploying various tools and techniques. As the name suggests, steering committee mainly involves business executives like the COO and CIO, who are responsible for steering the conversation toward digital solutions. The team of an RPA COE must include a business analyst, a solution architect, developers, a project manager, and quality assurance and testing personnel. The steering committee should also engage with the head of the COE team to understand the business use cases and engage the right level of technical developers to design and implement the plan. Beyond a COE and steering committee, it’s also critical to establish the proper execution blueprint. This includes learning to build test bots to understand the practical implementation of bots when it comes to the establishment of quick wins. At a higher level, there are things like outcomes, change management, version control and production support that need to be considered during execution when it comes to deploying bots at enterprise scale.
It can be said that the driving factors behind implementing robotic process automation mainly include cost reduction, the ability to increase productivity and the potential to have a long-term digital strategy in place that would handle a high volume of digital workloads.
Sustainability of RPA:
RPA has various advantages because of which businesses are adopting it and integrating it into their working system. After all, everyone would like to increase efficiency at a reduced cost. When the regular tasks are getting completed by a robot, a business can concentrate more on its product quality and services and work harder to flourish with better leads. However, the problem occurs if the business has been using a wrong tactic from the very beginning. RPA has the ability to learn the steps and execute the tasks. It will carry out all the steps without errors as per as what the user has instructed it to do so. However, an automated robot does not have the requisite intelligence to find out whether the instructions are correct or not. Hence, as the robot does not have the power to differentiate between the right and the wrong process of working, it might cause a problem in the long run.
Hence, one can easily claim RPA to be a useful and efficient methodology but there are both pros and cons to this technology. But lastly, it can be claimed to be an important technological development that would help highly in the long run to cut both time and cost. Hence, it is an advanced technology development that can help business platforms and industries perform better.