RPA and OCR – Elevating Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets in the enterprise automation segment in the past decade, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated its adoption across industries and geographies. RPA has been a key enabler for organizations in reduction of costs, greater operational efficiency and quality, increased workforce productivity, enhanced customer and employee experience, and quick time-to-value. Encouraged by a growing number of success stories and positive word of mouth, many enterprises, including service providers are investing in RPA.

The combination of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes even more compelling case for enterprises to adopt this technology at the drop of a hat.

The benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) often focus on cost and time-savings. While vitally important to any business, there’s far more to this transformational technology. In a recent survey, Gartner found that business leaders worldwide now see RPA as the second most important transformational technology. Organizations that have deployed automation report significant benefits in a wide range of business areas including cost reduction, process efficiency, business performance improvement and enhanced customer satisfaction. Today, organizations that are increasingly driven by customer and employee experience are turning to RPA as the catalyst for fresh, innovative thinking and business strategies. The emergence of intelligent automation—the integration of RPA with AI and other disruptive technologies—is enabling new levels of agility as enterprises across the globe wrestle with highly competitive and unpredictable business environments and rapidly evolving operating models—such as the need to ‘work from home’ during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Across verticals, the combination of RPA and OCR technologies can be leveraged to address business priorities such as improving Speed to Serve, reduce customer effort/ Increase customer experience and to reduce the cost to serve.

Teleperformance has helped several organizations with RPA and OCR deployment: Improved Customer onboarding time (BFSI), Improved processing of Insurance claims (Healthcare), Improved user onboarding time (Travel), Improved invoice processing time (F&A), Improved time to load contracts (Hospitality) and many more

Challenges and Limitations

Despite the multiple growth drivers, RPA deployment has its own set of challenges. Some of challenges that we observed at Teleperformance during the deployment of RPA based solutions:

• Working on wrong use cases for automation could result in lower ROI. Keeping best practices in mind during RPA implementation, could save time and effort both.
• It’s imperative for business to provide all support to RPA implementation, lack of support from the businesses may result in failure of the initiative.
• Sometimes there are processes that cannot be completely automated with RPA. These require Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence, which could be an added cost to the organization and the project.
• RPA initiatives requires a cultural and mindset shift within the organization, starting from the senior leadership. Any misguided information about RPA and its impact can create insecurity among employees that they might lose jobs.
• It is critical to have full support extended from the RPA platform vendor for project success, since they have the expertise in utilizing the tool and have worked with several customers on different RPA implementations

Future Scope:

Digital transformation has been gaining the traction and anticipates huge investment globally. One such advanced IT solution is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) that makes the business processes simple and brings automation for increasing productivity.

RPA is not just a means of reducing headcount, but an effective technology to complement the skills of the human workforce, and make their jobs more meaningful by handling more value-add complex work.

We, at Teleperformance, aim to quickly integrate RPA into the existing system at a minimal cost to help industries remain operational in any circumstances. With RPA in the system, there comes a set of predictions that would follow:

• Rise of SPA (Smart Process Automation): RPA is designed to automate structured data with a pre-defined set of rules. With the advent of AI and ML integrated into the RPA solution this paves the way for SPA bots. SPA enables RPA bots to benefit from the abilities of other emerging technologies including AI and big data
• Elimination of Paperwork: It is expected that the automation market will surge with easy-to-deploy RPA models that will automate the paperwork in the enterprises by 2025.
• Hyper-automation Platforms:  With many providers such as UiPath and Automation Anywhere offering cloud version of RPA platform that will help manage entire lifecycle of an RPA project i.e. ideation to benefit realization. This makes it increasingly easy to setup, develop and deploy bots with relatively lesser effort
• Bot Store: RPA providers offer a community marketplace to speed discovery, development, and deployment of intelligent automation. The store accelerates RPA initiatives by offering pre-built automations and plug-and-play integrations
• Emergence of RPA 2.0: Along with normal RPA, if we include software robots, AI, ML we will get RPA 2.0. RPA 2.0 will be a game-changer in terms of productivity, innovation, and efficiency across all departments

In recent times, RPA bots and intelligent automation (IA) solutions have become a necessity to survive and thrive. Companies need RPA implementation to deal with the situation that arises in these pandemic and post-pandemic times. RPA can open new horizons for every business and bring new potential to your company for offering a better and personalized customer experience.

At Teleperformance, we have created a platform agnostic RPA Framework (APDLO) that helps organizations in their RPA journey i.e. right from idea selection to benefit realization. With Teleperformance’s bot store, we have improved our speed to deliver and have been able to deploy bots successfully across different verticals.

Let’s take informed, intelligent, and impeccable steps towards a better future with RPA and OCR capabilities. Creating an unending bond between human and technology.

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