Top RPA Use Cases In Different Industries Rakesh Reddy November 1, 2019

Top RPA Use Cases In Different Industries

Top RPA Use Cases In Different Industries

Over the course of the last few years, we have witnessed that companies that integrate Robotic Process Automation (RPA) into their back-end operations manage to improve their business metrics exponentially. RPA has helped our clients and many large organizations across industries to automate a myriad of repetitive tasks and reduce costs. Deloitte’s Annual Global RPA Survey Report validated these claims by revealing that 86% of the participating companies asserted that productivity improvement from RPA exceeded their expectations.

Here’s a breakdown of the Top RPA Use Cases across industries that you should be aware of:

Banking

RPA has enabled banks and financial institutions to improve compliance, work timelines, accuracy, quality of processes and efficiency of back-end operations besides saving time. The technology has helped banks to automate human activities such as data entry, loan processing, credit card bill settlements, and mortgage remediation. Today, when data privacy and security debates are at its peak, flagging suspicious activities and customer onboarding is effortless, courtesy RPA.

United Overseas Bank (UOB), for instance, was able to considerably reduce the time taken to process requests for letters of credit from the corporate clients. The bank’s RPA-powered robot ‘Amy’ was also able to extract, filter and feed a large amount of data into the back-end system and complete the task in 40 seconds. Prior to implementing Amy, this task usually would take up to 4 minutes (240 seconds).

UOB has also entrusted RPA with repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as reviewing credit card applications. With the ability to review 1,800 applications per day, which is 3.5 times faster than the human employees, the intelligent tool has improved UOB’s speed, accuracy and response time of processing unsecured loan service requests. This has also enabled the bank’s employees to focus on complex, productive and challenging tasks that requires human intervention, knowledge and expertise.

Insurance

“In an insurer we studied, there was a particular process where it used to take two days to handle 500 premium advice notes. It now takes 30 minutes,” stated Leslie Willcocks,  a professor at the London School of Economics while speaking to McKinsey.

This huge jump in processing time was made possible by RPA. Before deploying the technology, the data for the premium advice notes would manually travel from brokers to a central repository to a process operator. If any piece of information went missing, the process operator had to reach out to the broker and start the process again. With RPA, an activity that took days was reduced down to thirty minutes.

For an industry that deals with an overwhelming amount of data and processes, RPA enables insurance companies to tie up the front-end with the back-end operations and reduce manual labor/intervention. Case in point: It can simplify the underwriting process by evaluating an applicant’s risk at a faster rate and much more efficiently compared to manual evaluation. The same formula applies to using RPA for evaluating, structuring and standardizing data for claims registration & processing, regulatory compliance, process and business analytics, form registration and policy cancellation.

CPG And Retail

Being a heavily consumer-driven industry which is growing at a jet speed, it is imperative that Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Retail industry players use technology-powered tools like RPA to accelerate growth. Be it straight-forward processes like invoicing to complex processes like logistics management, RPA’s potential benefits are manifold when it comes to the CPG and retail industry.

Organizations looking to fine-tune their inventory, freight, supply & demand, returns and invoice processes would benefit from RPA. It also allows businesses to improve their HR services, sales analytics, back-office management, trade promotions, marketing mixes, customer experience, and employee satisfaction.

For instance, Forrester’s Predictions 2019: Automation report stated that RPA would assist companies in eliminating 20% of service desk back-end tasks by the end of 2019, Forbes reports. Take, for example, retailers can integrate an RPA bot to take over the FAQ chatbot and customer help-desk in the back end. This could increase user engagement rate, new customer acquisition rate, and sales conversion rate, besides reducing response time and taking the pressure off of call-center employees. New retail players and online-only start-ups with limited resources and physical can use RPA as digital labor.

Manufacturing

With the help of a robot-powered automation tool, organizations can reduce bill of materials’ errors, refine inventory management and take advantage of automation to connect legacy systems. All back-end tasks that are time-consuming but are one of the main drivers of profitability like customer support and administration can be efficiently managed while keeping the labor hours and cost low. By using RPA, adapting and modifying the manufacturing operations as and when the industry regulations, compliance measures and standards change is much easier and smooth, minus errors.

Healthcare

RPA in healthcare can help automate several complex and time consuming tasks for payers, hospitals and health systems, and long-term care facilities while scaling down the required resources. These tasks can be in the areas of financial transactions, claims administration, claims denial management, and pre-service business processes.

Managing a health plan can get expensive due to administrative functions like claims adjudication, authorizations and coordination of provider services. RPA platforms can automate these processes and help you bring down costs and improve provider-member interactions.

RPA applications can be integrated with front-end clinical systems and enable your staff to spend more time on collections.

Ideal RPA Use Cases To Get Started With

RPA technologies are emerging and so are the use cases. We believe RPA offers a myriad of use cases for finance & accounting, supply chain and HR functions.

Based on our observations in different industries, we have listed down some profitable and not-so-profitable RPA use cases

Finance And Accounting

Profitable RPA Use CasesNot So Profitable RPA Use Cases
  • Invoice Processing
  • Vendor reconciliation
  • Payments management
  • Customer invoicing
  • Reporting
  • Journal entries
  • Payroll accounting
  • Cost & inventory
  • Controls and credit review
  • Cash forecasting
  • Accounts finalization
  • Tax filing
  • Profitability analysis

Supply Chain

Profitable RPA Use CasesNot So Profitable RPA Use Cases
  • Order entry and provisioning
  • Vendor statement reconciliation
  • Material management
  • Inventory management
  • External interactions
  • Direct goods sourcing
  • Strategic relationship management
  • New suppliers identification and inventory
  • Non standard purchases

HR

Profitable RPA Use CasesNot So Profitable RPA Use Cases
  • HR admin EDM
  • Recruitment administration
  • Training administration
  • Payroll execution
  • Policy governance
  • Review and approvals
  • Employee relations

Robotic Automation Is The Future

The use cases of Robotic Process Automation reflects the versatility of modern automation across industries. From allowing banks to merge legacy database effortlessly to evaluating claims in a record-time without any errors for insurance companies, from helping manufacturing, retail and CPG industries to iron out the kinks of back-end system to empower the health-care industry to upgrade patient-care standards, RPA offers tangible benefits.

Owing to its quick deployment cycle time and a quick ROI, it has emerged as the preferred strategic tool to usher in positive change within an organization. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Gartner declared RPA as the fastest-growing enterprise software category.

If you’re planning to implement RPA in your organization, please feel free to get in touch with one of our RPA experts for a personalized consultation.

You may also be interested in checking out our RPA services and solutions.