Pros and Cons of Robotic Process Automation

As the COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the need for efficiency and process improvement, RPA has grown in popularity. Many firms make the mistake of investing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) without first determining whether it will be effective, whether it is a suitable match for their company, and if there are other automation technologies that can provide long-term sustainable outcomes. 

Pros

Efficiency: As a consequence, businesses can expect increased productivity without incurring the cost increases that would have occurred if they employed new personnel to do the same amount of work in the same amount of time.  

Reducing Errors: RPA robots can only complete a few jobs, but they don’t make the same mistakes that people do. The robots will perform precisely what is asked of them, no more and no less. 

Agility: Workers can make rapid changes inside RPA software, which is often lightweight and adaptable, rather than having IT personnel carve out time and resources to alter the underlying business processes, which is typically more time-consuming, difficult, and expensive operation. As a result, firms can utilize RPA to make quick changes to processes, enhancing their agility even further. 

Freeing up Employees: According to IT advisers and management executives, RPA typically helps firms to move workers’ attention from low-value jobs to higher-value ones that improve customer experience and, as a result, promote revenue development. An employee who performs a task that might be handled by an RPA is not doing anything else that could be more productive. 

Employee Engagement: Employees can devote more time to more meaningful work since RPA bots perform the repetitive, and often tedious, duties within the organization, according to Abel. This results in more engaged employees. 

Customer satisfaction: Customers can benefit from businesses automating procedures since it can provide a faster and better experience. A bot, for example, can access and retrieve information in real-time to respond to a client’s request, eliminating the need to put the consumer on hold. 

Business continuity support: Building bots that can take over duties traditionally done by outsourced services in the event those services are knocked offline can assist organizations to support their business continuity (BC) plans. 

Cons

Long-term sustainability: RPA has the potential to become a severe distraction from the long-term work required to automate and improve administrative operations. There’s a chance you’ll focus on fast fixes rather than doing things right the first time. 

Implementation: RPA could provide high value in isolated jobs, but it requires time and money to implement. Cutting shortcuts on RPA is also a poor idea because a miscalibration will lead to inaccuracies. A process that is inefficient will not be altered merely by adding some “smartness” at the top. You should be aware that about half of all RPA systems fail when they are first implemented, thus the deployment may need more resources than you anticipated. 

Error magnification: RPA robots are unable to spot some obvious faults that a person would quickly notice. RPA robots will not alert you to an issue with your data; instead, they will send it on, exacerbating an error that may have been discovered otherwise. 

Overall risk: Some challenges, especially when the stakes are high, aren’t a good fit for RPA. If you need to manage your purchase invoices, for example, it’s probably a better idea to start with software that can comprehend and manage the data appropriately. 

Maintenance: Most RPA systems must be tailored to your company’s needs. Investing in such a system is unlikely to be worthwhile if your company’s operations are anticipated to alter dramatically in the future. Even little modifications in your configuration might cause major problems for your RPA robots. 

Automating your business requires a considerable financial commitment. Before you commit to a project to add automation to your business model, think about what you want it to do. Whether you’re wanting to modernize your financial process and automate accounts payable or accounting, improve customer service, handle incoming emails, and much more, a more extensive strategy than merely scratching the surface is required for long-term outcomes.  

Automation, when done correctly, can enhance efficiency by eliminating the chance of human mistakes and increasing the pace of specific processes. Automation, on the other hand, can accomplish nothing for your organization without good planning and insight into the data you’re managing, and it can rapidly become a sunk expenditure.