2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the term “robot.” Playwright Karel Capek coined the word in his science fiction masterpiece, R.U.R. Although robots are shaping our future, the concept has been around since ancient times. After all, who wouldn’t want a mechanical device that reduces our workload by shouldering our repetitive tasks?

But many of the negative myths we harbor today came from Capek’s play. So, let’s address them here.

– Robots probably won’t lead to mass unemployment.

– They do not have feelings.

– They probably are not plotting behind our backs in side-banded, quantum-encrypted bitstreams about how to take over the world.

However, Robotics Process Automation can speed up, integrate, and streamline many corporate processes. With RPA in place, businesses can save time and money, thus improving employee and customer satisfaction. And it can certainly be put to good use in financial planning and analysis. Businesses can get the timely data they need to be agile in this time of change.

Benefits of RPA

RPA reduces your costs of doing business while resulting in greater customer satisfaction. Here’s how: RPA software incorporates sophisticated software to perform high-volume tasks such as invoicing & tracking payments; simple data entry, extraction, conversion, and analysis; generating reports; bulk emailing.

Once you’ve set up your initial request, the software works behind the scenes to respond to triggers, launch bots to seek out the necessary data, and run processes. Your backend operations are handled with little or no human interaction.

The benefits to your company are enormous. RPA streamlines those boring, repetitive processes, and that enhances workplace productivity. It ensures fast, high-quality results.  Traditional methods take time, but with robotics, changes made to data or processes are automatically implemented across-the-board. Team members save tons of time not having to go cell-by-cell or tab-by-tab through one—or MANY—spreadsheets to make updates.

This yields up-to-the-minute response time to market conditions. Business owners can make speedy recommendations; their clients can make the right decisions fast. Finance teams look good, and they have more time to focus on providing insight for strategic decision-making in product development, delivery, and customer service.

Did I mention reduced business costs? Once the software is in place, companies save time and money on all those manual tasks.  According to recent research, 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement RPA (Gartner) and 98% of IT leaders say automating business processes is vital to driving business benefits.

With this momentum and the clear benefits of automation, I imagine the scale and scope of RPA implementations across business processes will only increase!