3 Areas Where RPA with Power Automate Delivers Great Business Value 

Faster turnaround cycles, just-in-time production, real-time decisions, and instant user interactions are the hallmark of the modern age. Speed and agility are imperative for business success. To ensure sustained efficiency of processes, leveraging technologies such as RPA become essential. 

Why RPA?

Humans can only complete so many tasks within a defined timeline. Repetitive and low-value tasks when done manually take time and effort. This leads to low productivity and impacts the bottom line.   

RPA or robotic process automation is becoming an essential technology in almost every enterprise's toolkit, as it delegates high-volume, monotonous work to bots. This optimizes processes and increases efficiencies and accuracy while reducing operational costs. 

RPA can be seen as the first and essential step to automation. RPA automates tasks and processes using software scripts that emulate human interaction. It allows businesses to automate mundane, repetitive rule-based business processes using technologies like voice or image recognition, predictive analytics, cognitive decision-making, self-healing, etc.  

Often the quick wins available from implementing RPA soundly set the stage for wider automation initiatives across the enterprise. 

RPA delivers significant benefits like: 

• RPA removes repetitive effort and reduces processing time. 

• Streamlining workflows and optimization. 

• Enterprises can eliminate errors and disruption and complete projects. 

• Significant savings since the automation bots are low maintenance. 

• Immediate ROI and reduced operational costs. 

• Access to clean and well-organized data for clearer and exact insights to drive decisions. 

• Employees can focus on high-value tasks by taking the burden of tedious tasks off their shoulders. 

• Ensure regulatory compliance by providing complete traceability of the data and processes. 

• Elevate customer experiences by increasing business responsiveness. 

According to a Deloitte Global RPA  Survey: 

• 53% of respondents have already started their RPA journey. This is expected to increase to 72% in the next two years. 

• RPA continues to meet and exceed expectations across multiple dimensions including improved compliance (92%), improved quality/accuracy (90%), improved productivity (86%), and cost reduction (59%). 

• 78% of those who have already implemented RPA expect to significantly increase investment in RPA over the next three years. 

RPA adoption  in the enterprise has seen consistent growth. The global robotic process automation market size is projected to increase from USD 10.01 billion in 2022 to USD 43.52 billion by 2029 at a healthy CAGR of 23.4%.  

There are many functional areas across industries where RPA delivers significant benefits. Some of them are: 

• Accounting and audits 

The accounts payable, accounting, and audit functions are among the most paper and effort-intensive functions. They demand significant working hours and need a keen eye for detail. Large amounts of tedious, repetitive work such as processing purchase orders and routing them for approval, invoice processing, receivable management, etc. are areas where human effort can be easily replaced with RPA. 

From basic account reconciliation to handling comparative audit tasks required within general revenue audits, conducting periodic ledger reconciliation as part of compliance measures, and exception flagging, RPA makes these processes more efficient and accurate. 

With ongoing rules-based risk assessment, organizations can reduce the strain placed on audit professionals. The system can capably initiate alerts in the case of potential risk violations from specific transactions or changes in the company's financial vitals. 

• Human resource efficiency 

The Human Resources department handles highly sensitive data that needs prompt updating into enterprise systems. Today, this department has to ensure that process speed and data security are not at odds with each other. 

HR RPA can infuse dated HR processes with speed and agility. From aiding recruitment by shortlisting resumes based on predefined logic and creating and updating candidate records in applicant tracking and other systems to enabling self-service with RPA-powered chatbots, RPA can elevate HR efficiency and employee experience simultaneously. 

RPA can also be used in onboarding, expense submissions, time-off requests, and more. This technology helps HR focus on initiatives that impact the organization positively rather than remain chained to paperwork.  

Automated checks and regulatory submissions and updates help compliance as well. RPA can also be used to automate the delivery of educational materials, help managers create data-backed and contextual performance plans and track employee training. It also helps enterprises streamline and simplify common HR processes. 

• Supply chain management 

Smooth supply chain management is a foremost concern for almost all businesses. The move towards e-Commerce and rising customer expectations demand supply chain efficiencies for faster order fulfilment, ensuring smooth delivery experiences and enabling accurate decision-making. 

Robotic Process Automation in supply chain and logistics allows enterprises to conduct complex calculations, system updates, and data reconciliation faster. Integration with AI, AR, and IoT contributes to improving warehouse efficiency and ensuring end-to-end visibility. 

RPA also fuels processes such as order management, email automation, invoicing, handling returns, and inventory process automation and makes them more efficient and accurate. It can improve demand and forecasting capabilities significantly and automate data updating and can capably deliver deep insights for better warehouse planning, and inventory management 

Amongst the many RPA platforms in the market, Microsoft's Power Automate Platform stands out. Power Automate allows organizations to create automated workflows between apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more. It offers hundreds of pre-built connectors, AI Builder, UI Flows (RPA), DPA, trigger search, and more. It allows organizations to enable automation the way they want. It also helps organizations run desktop flows with human interaction or autonomously on Microsoft-hosted infrastructure that automatically scales. 

Since it is integrated with Windows, Power Automate helps enable desktop automation quickly directly from the Start menu. This intelligent cloud-based application helps enterprises and even business users automate repetitive, manual, and time-consuming processes with zero coding and minimal effort.  

Microsoft's Power Automate Platform has helped organizations improve business outcomes by empowering employees to create solutions for themselves and others. A leader in the  2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant  for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Microsoft's Power Automate Platform delivers a 140% ROI over three years. It’s time for your enterprise to experience the power of RPA with Microsoft Power Automate.