Robotic process automation (RPA) is still relatively new, with a market value forecast to reach $23.9 billion by 2030.It’s easy to see why—especially with the uncertainty brought by the global pandemic.

Businesses worldwide had to learn to be flexible and react fast to rapid changes in every sector and industry. Companies that had already implemented automation in their business processes proved their ability to stay agile and adapt.

Even with the unprecedented increase in using software robotics and automation tools to solve many challenges, some companies still maintain legacy applications and traditional automation projects because it works for them.

While it’s hard to imagine a business not using automation, Deloitte found that 78% of business leaders have already implemented RPA, and 93% of companies expect to use it by 2023.

So, what’s the difference between RPA and traditional automation and why do business leaders prefer one over the other?

We’ll review both types of automation and explain when you should use RPA instead of traditional automation.

WHAT CONSTITUTES TRADITIONAL AUTOMATION?

Traditional automation involves automating repetitive tasks by integrating applications at database or infrastructure levels with minimal human intervention.

“In traditional automation, you can find a program or tool that can automate tasks or processes. Alternatively, you can request your IT team to write a program that can automate those tasks for you. To do this, you have to change the existing program or application to achieve the automation through writing a macro or using a third-party program.” —Dee Shawn, Leaniar VP for Delivery

For instance, your IT team or programmer can write a code that automates and/or schedules the copy and paste task instead of employees copying and pasting data manually through keyboard strokes (CTRL+C and CTRL+V). Or, they can create a program that can automate exporting of spreadsheet or Excel data from a business system or application.

Traditional automation includes tools such as:

• Macros: Companies still use these to date, particularly in Excel spreadsheets for calculations, automation, data search, and other tasks.
• Screen scraping: This involves scraping data or pulling it from the web on the presentation layer or screen. Its success or failure depends on your existing tech stack and framework, so it’s not adaptable or versatile for the average business user.
• Workflow automation: With workflow automation tools, you can eliminate the need for manual data entry. These tools capture customer data, translate them to your database, and alert the relevant employee or department, boosting productivity, increasing efficiency, accuracy, and employee engagement.
• Point-to-point integration/automation: If you need to transfer data between machines or systems (e.g., between an ERP and Salesforce), this tool allows you to create an application program interface (API) to automate data transfer activities and enable information sharing between systems.

Organizations that still use traditional automation focus more on how humans or software can address new problems. Their IT teams are constantly working to create solutions, write code, and find third-party tools that can best solve their problems.

A common practice with traditional automation is outsourcing teams to other parts of the world. It may save money initially, but it has drawbacks, such as lack of control, language barriers, systems with steep learning curves, high personnel turnover, and more.

Plus, tasks generally take longer to complete with traditional automation, and there are many hidden costs—especially “lost time”—which companies now save by implementing RPA in their business processes and operations.

Traditional automation methods aren’t outdated; they still have a place in organizations—especially in tasks involving transferring volumes of data between systems or applications.

However, Vargha Moayed, UiPath’s chief strategy officer, says traditional automation leaves enterprises in a tough spot owing to increasing customer expectations:

“If we look at how enterprises have traditionally automated clerical work, it’s typically according to functions using full-stack applications. This was an appropriate approach at the time. As a result, large enterprises have witnessed an exponential increase in the complexity of their IT landscape. It’s a labyrinthine web of software, databases and information. Customer expectations are sky-high, but the legacy systems that once served them can become a drag. This is because their functionally-oriented and siloed IT systems were typically designed with an internal focus, rather than according to customer experience.”

Early developments (pre-RPA) of the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1990s, such as machine learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), screen scraping, workflow automation, and others, led to the development of simple RPA.

But RPA wasn’t popular until the late 2000s, when it entered the mainstream business landscape. Early, basic RPA versions helped automate rule-based tasks but lacked the cognitive capabilities that characterize more recent versions currently in use.

Software robots—or RPA bots—now take up the rote, mundane, and repetitive tasks of human employees, delivering benefits such as:

• Saving time and reducing operating costs
• Streamlining business processes
• Reducing human errors
• Improving operational efficiency
• Boosting productivity and employee engagement
• Increasing customer satisfaction

WHAT IS ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION?

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a technology that uses software robots or “bots” to perform repetitive tasks with little to no human intervention. Software bots simulate a human user’s work, executing rote, rules-based tasks across a wide range of business processes in your legacy systems and enterprise applications.

RPA differs from traditional automation—which works best when moving volumes of data between systems and relies on creating solutions, writing lots of code, and third-party tools to solve business challenges.

RPA deploys scripts that mimic the user interface path your human workforce uses to perform routine tasks involving structured data.

These digital robots don’t replace your software. Instead, they sit on top of your existing infrastructure and technology, interacting with business applications and systems just like your employees do—except bots are faster, work nonstop, at less cost, and with 100% accuracy and reliability.

For instance, bots can copy and paste data into a spreadsheet, fill out forms, or open and move files without employee involvement.

Somewhat surprising is that some organizations—particularly those that already automate their processes—confuse RPA and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While they’re distinct and co-evolving technologies, they complement each other, creating a more accurate, efficient, and intelligent robotic process automation that drives output at scale.

In a production environment, for instance, AI-powered bots can analyze and select vendors, gather and analyze data, and compare vendors based on their experience, pricing, and reliability.

THE BENEFITS OF RPA IMPLEMENTATIONS

To succeed in today’s economy, organizations need to maximize productivity while reducing operational costs and, ultimately, operate with increased efficiency.

Automation offers many significant benefits that can help you get ahead. The following details what RPA can bring to your business:

• Higher productivity
• Better efficiency with fewer or no errors
• Improved employee engagement
• No disruption of existing systems or applications
• Scales with your business
• Rapid return on investment (ROI)
• Minimal initial/upfront spend
• Save time and operational costs
• Make processes lean
• Reduce go-to-market time
• Maintain an audit trail
• Drive product innovation
• Easier data retrieval and access
• Better compliance

RPA’S WIDE RANGE OF USE CASES

Put bots anywhere, and they’ll be up and running within minutes, taking on any repetitive, manual tasks.

From recruitment to onboarding to invoice processing to prescription management, you can implement RPA in a wide range of use cases, depending on your industry. Some common business applications include:

• Human Resources: Software bots automate and execute HR processes such as recruitment, hiring, and onboarding, which involve a lot of standardization and information management across many digital systems.
• Financial Services: Lenders and other financial service providers use RPA to automate rule-based operations requiring speed and high accuracy. These include account opening, customer inquiry processing, Know Your Customer (KYC) research, reconciliation, report generation, anti-money laundering (AML), regulatory compliance, and more.
• Retail: RPA helps manage inventory, supply chain operations, warehouse order management, customer service and feedback, and returns processing, among other processes in the modern retail industry. This improves employee productivity and customer support.
• Insurance: Multiple repetitive processes in the insurance industry, including claims processing, underwriting, policy management, and regulatory compliance, can be automated, leading to speed, efficiency, and better customer experiences.
• Information Technology: RPA provides capabilities that automate process flows and data at granular levels for better information-sharing and communication between systems. It also creates a virtual workforce (bots), which augments IT skills, making your team’s capabilities more multifaceted and your business more efficient.
• Telecommunications: Businesses in the telecom industry experience massive, tech-driven growth. RPA can help streamline infrastructure and data-sharing in your company’s applications and infrastructure, manage customer record-keeping, and ensure regulatory compliance, among other tasks.
• Manufacturing: RPA optimizes the core manufacturing operations for improved speed, agility, and quality. Learn more in our Beginner’s Guide to RPA for Manufacturing.
• Healthcare and Life Sciences: Healthcare and life sciences professionals rely on accuracy and compliance to deliver quality services to patients whose health and welfare depend on them. RPA streamlines information management and other processes, reducing errors and improving the patient experience.
• Supply chain: Companies can use RPA to integrate information across operation managers and shippers within supply chain operations. Automation improves order processing and management, procurement, inventory management, shipping and logistics, warehouse management, and supply and demand planning.
• Legal and Compliance: RPA handles mundane tasks that legal and compliance teams spend too much time on, such as research, database lookups, and other documentation. This frees them up to provide better legal advice and advocacy.

WHAT PROCESSES FIT RPA?

The automation journey is remarkably simple, but it helps to review and determine the administrative tasks suitable for automation that lead to improved ROI. This way, you can tell whether it’s wise to continue performing the task manually or consider an enhanced automation solution.

Typically, RPA-ready tasks exhibit the following key characteristics:

• Rules-based: RPA bots follow well-defined, unambiguous process rules with template-driven or clear processing instructions in the “If X then Y” format. For example, tasks like copying and pasting or calculations.
• Repetitive: The more a business process is repeated, the more likely it should be automated. Simple, consistent, and repeatable tasks are more suitable for RPA than one-off or custom processes with minimal repetition, which are low-priority automation candidates.
• High-volume, high frequency: RPA works well for simple tasks or processes that operate in high frequency and volume and require accuracy and strict adherence to regulations.
• Stable and standardized: Well-documented, predictable, and stable tasks based on standardized, predictive rules are suitable for RPA.
• Handled manually, time-consuming, error-prone: Repetitive low-skill tasks like cutting-and-pasting, which are prone to human error, should also be automated to save time and improve customer and worker experiences.
• Highly organized with structured data and inputs: RPA automates tasks that rely on structured digital data.
• Low exception: RPA lessens the need for human intervention to repetitive, rote tasks and processes, meaning the process should require limited exception handling if it’s to be automated.
• High ROI potential: Processes that can provide savings in terms of time, money, and work are suitable candidates for RPA.
• Works with readable inputs: RPA also works in processes with standard and consistent readable electronic input like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email, readable PDF, and more, compared to scanned images that aren’t readable or lack optical character recognition (OCR).
• Already/Difficult to outsource: Processes like invoice processing, which are difficult to outsource or you’re already outsourcing, can be automated for faster output and service delivery.
• Complex and scenario-based: Automate processes that cannot be changed based on underlying technical system architecture in the short term and are based on specific scenarios.

Some tasks may have one or more of these characteristics but would need a process redesign or additional data capture capabilities to make them fully digital and RPA-ready.

WHAT PROCESS CAN BE AUTOMATED IN ORACLE?

Before you jump in and start implementing RPA in Oracle, identify the potential opportunities for efficiency improvements and cost savings in your business processes.

Generally, RPA uses software robots to automate and execute tasks that are:

• Repetitive and rules-based
• Tedious, time-consuming, and mundane
• Stable and standardized
• High-volume and high-frequency
• Prone to errors and inaccuracies
• Involve large volumes of disparate, structured data

Bots can automate a breadth of activities in business operations, including sales, customer service, and accounts payable.

Here are some examples of tasks you can start automating in Oracle.

ORDER-TO-CASH (O2C)

Customers expect you to handle all aspects of a sale quickly and efficiently and deliver their orders in a timely fashion. Many companies still rely on manual order-to-cash (O2C) processes, so they don’t maximize their O2C cycle.

Oracle RPA automates O2C processes from sales order entry to product shipping to billing and payment collection to reporting so you can:

• Eliminate billing errors
• Improve efficiency
• Reduce payment delays and day sales outstanding
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Boost profitability

ON-PREMISE TO CLOUD: THE EVOLUTION OF SAP

SAP workloads are business-critical. Any strategic changes—whether technology or deployment—can significantly impact its customers.

One such directive is the mandate to migrate to SAP HANA, then SAP S/4HANA, and move to the cloud.

While businesses would like to leverage the innovative capabilities SAP offers, it’s not always possible to keep up. For instance, cloud migration is prevalent among client data centers but not for general-purpose and SAP workloads.

Some business challenges SAP customers face migrating to the cloud include:

• Duration
• Costs
• Availability of tools and industry experts
• No confidence in the maturity of S/4HANA
• Hybrid platform complexities
• Migration’s low precedence among other IT priorities
• Inability to provide a justifiable business case

With RPA, SAP customers can move to SAP S/4HANA cloud without the hassle of managing infrastructure. For example, UiPath—which has many SAP connectors—automates SAP S/4HANA migration so you can achieve lower operational costs, rapid time to value, high scalability, and real digital transformation.

RPA reduces the overall timeline and critical path of the migration while reducing the risk of the entire migration project.

SAP Automation helps you:

• Detect essential business processes in SAP
• Know what to focus on and how business users apply the SAP process
• Reduce S/4HANA system test time, cost, and manual effort

Next, let’s look at what RPA and SAP can achieve together.