40 Real World Use Cases of Robotic Process Automation Across Industries

If today you come to the Center for public services (or some other old-school institution) on any issue, a lot of time is spent waiting: an employee enters information from various documents into the required forms, checkmarks some things, sends some requests, etc.

Suitable technologies are already ready and practically tested. This is RPA – Robotic Process Automation.

The term was coined in 2012 by Blue Prism. They pioneered the automation of office operations management services 18 years ago. True, at that time, this idea was not taken seriously, and big businesses considered it more romantic than real.

This all changed with the advent of artificial intelligence systems. It was they who radically changed the attitude towards RPA. We’re ready to discover RPA use cases to familiarize you with the top solution for boosting your company’s productivity.

Robotic Process Automation is a modern technological solution that comes to the rescue for automating many routine processes.

For example, bank employees often, throughout the day, copy information from one system to another and transfer customer data to conclude an agreement with him or draw up an application for a loan. An employee can perform hundreds of such operations per day, requiring no talent other than attentiveness.

RPA robotization is needed precisely to shift all these routine processes from humans to robots.

Modern RPA systems are capable of performing a large number of actions:

• Open and interact with apps
• Copy the information, and paste the required data into the required cells.
• Navigate sites, push data into web forms, and click site buttons.
• Recognize text.
• Load data from different sources into one, and copy from one into several.
• Compare and verify the information.
• Communicate via instant messenger (chatbots).

RPA technology makes it possible to free employees from such work since robots can do all this much faster and more accurately.

One of the main benefits is time savings. After all, a robot can do everything many times faster than a human. Moreover, the latter makes many mistakes. This is not surprising if, in a day, you need to copy a hundred questionnaires with 50 fields in each.

Additional employees are often used to control the correctness of data transfer, which the company has to keep on staff. At the same time, RPA process automation would avoid such costs.

Finally, implementing RPA frees human employees from tedious routine work and allows them to use their real talents for the company’s good.

Even though the RPA market is still small, it is growing steadily. In several years RPA spending will reach $ 1 billion (according to forecasts from one of the world’s leading analytical agencies, Gartner). By then, 40% of large organizations will already use RPA tools.

Add to this the demand for AI and machine learning that integrates with RPA solutions, and you will know the prospects for growth in this direction.

We also provide RPA workshops and training teaching your non-technical teams how to run, manage and maintain RPA bots.

Here we’ll discuss some Robotic Process Automation use cases in the real business world. This includes:

• Examples of using RPA in Telecom
• RPA for IT processes, automation for consultancy
• RPA Case Studies in Finance & Banking
• RPA Case Studies for Customer Service
• Example of using RPA in administration processes
• Examples of using RPA in HR
• RPA Use Cases in the Insurance Industries
• RPA Retail Use Cases
• Examples of RPA in Healthcare
• RPA Use Cases in Logistics
• RPA Examples in Manufacturing

See more about RPA in real estate.

There are many examples of automation in the healthcare industry as it can benefit greatly from automating processes:

1. Payment Processing: A significant portion of RPA in health case studies is developed in the payments department of RCM institutions. Hospitals can automate payment processing and reduce staff workload.
RPA for medical billing is the most crucial element of Revenue Cycle Management, as it can significantly impact a company’s bottom line.

2. Claims Management: Patients and hospitals often manage insurance claims. RPA software bots can automate claims management using predefined parameters to collect claims data.

See what insurance claims processing automation looks like:

3. Patient Registration: One of the best RPA areas in healthcare is patient registration, which is time-consuming. RPA bots can fill in data and prepare a patient registration form quickly.

Read more about the processes in the healthcare industry you didn’t know could be automated.

There are countless use cases for RPA in the manufacturing industry.

4. Administration and reporting. One of the main advantages of RPA in manufacturing is that it can generate accurate production reports and provide a clear picture of the status. This facilitates efficient decision-making and quick response to production needs.

5. Inventory Management: RPA in Inventory Management can automate email, digitize documents, and monitor inventory levels and product demand.

6. Material BOMs: Manufacturing RPA use cases to demonstrate how software bots can automate material billing by extracting data and ensuring data accuracy, reducing errors and transactional problems.

Some of the best use cases for robotic process automation can be seen in the telecommunications sector.

7. Account Verification: Telecom companies must verify accounts for users who choose postpaid bills. Requires manual processing of documentation.

8. Reporting: Operators must manually generate reports of connectivity problems based on severity and submit them to management. RPA is best suited for automating reporting.

9. Easy Request Forwarding: RPA bots can receive emails from users and other interested parties and automatically forward them to interested people based on several parameters.

10. Number porting: One of the best examples of robotic process automation in the telecommunications industry is customer number porting, which can be automated without problems.

The tech sector has certainly felt the greatest impact of robotic process automation.

11. Installing tools: RPA can automate the process of installing devices in the system and save employees a lot of time.

12. Configuration: Developers need to set up the environment in which they write code. RPA is best suited for automating the initial configuration and setting up this environment on every system, as the process is the same.

13. Automation Testing: Another great RPA business case example in the technology sector is automation testing. Manual user testing takes time and involves many tricks. Common test scripts are automated through RPA, which runs after each update. This ensures that bugs are found and fixed faster than manual testing.

Banks are notoriously inefficient, but banking robotics to automate processes has changed the game. RPA has some of the most useful financial use cases like:

14. Credit Checks: RPA software bots can now perform credit checks on potential loans and determine whether they meet the loan disbursement parameters. This has dramatically reduced the loan processing time.

15. Data Entry: Bankers manually entered customer information from documents. By parsing documents, RPA robots can automatically fill data into forms by extracting them from documents.

16. Know Your Customer (KYC): If your company does not prefer to use specialized KYC solutions, you can use RPA bots to automate parts of the KYC process. In extreme cases where human intervention is required, the case may be referred to as an employee.

17. Verification of applications. Companies like United Overseas Bank have automated their credit card application verification process, increasing speed and response times.

18. Connecting customers: Another great use of robotic process automation in banking is opening accounts and connecting customers – a routine process that requires automation.

Read how we implemented RPA for a leading US bank.
Check how RPA can be implemented in the finance industry, what are the benefits and case studies.

RPA can automate customer relationship management and generate valuable customized results.

This improves the quality of customer service and increases satisfaction by:

19. Fast Initial Responses: RPA software bots can sort common customer requests and deliver immediate responses. Of course, it needs to be integrated with AI for best results.

20. Forwarding requests: RPA bots can sort requests into categories based on your set parameters and automatically send them to the appropriate departments.

21. Data categorization: Robotic process automation allows companies to categorize customers and define their paths for better targeting and service.

Retail is a consumer-driven industry. That’s why the industry’s rapidly evolving nature forces businesses to cut costs and improve efficiency.

Along with the other use cases for RPA, here are some of the benefits in retail:

22. Product categorization: RPA bots can extract SKU data to help companies categorize products and determine their market share in different regions. This will save you countless hours of work.

23. Returning a product: Returning a product requires a lot of processing and formalities. RPA bots allow you to verify purchase records and expedite the entire return process

24. Inventory Management: Another great use case for RPA in retail is inventory management. Robotic Process Automation bots can provide data on key elements and alert the system to a shortage or overflow.

In most cases, RPA allows for easy data processing, including retrieving and then filling out the appropriate forms. Some of the examples of the use of RPA in the documentation include:

25. Invoice Processing: RPA can automate paper invoices using OCR, extract data, and automatically send it to the appropriate stakeholders.

26. Data Entry: RPA is perhaps the most common use case for robotic process automation. It allows companies to quickly enter data into Excel or CRM and reduce processing time.

27. Storing customer information: RPA software bots can easily save customer information from the initial forms they fill out and present it in an easy-to-read format.

Human resource management performs some of the most tedious tasks in an organization.

Here are how RPA is used and some examples of business process automation in HR:

28. Lead Finder: RPA bots allow HR managers to search for suitable prospects and candidates based on pre-set parameters. The bots will automatically receive the data when the parameters match the prospect’s profile.

29. Onboarding employees: The onboarding process requires interviews and documentation. Robotic Process Automation allows you to automate these processes for faster processing.

30. Payroll Automation: RPA software bots allow you to automate payroll by pulling data from timesheets and calculating payroll at the end of each month. They can compile accurate payrolls and calculate salaries in seconds.

Complaints about the time constantly plagues the insurance industry it takes to process claims. If you are wondering: “What is the use of RPA in insurance? “here’s the answer:

31. Claims Verification: Robotic Process Automation enables insurance companies to verify claims using predefined rules and minimize fraud.

32. Claims processing time: Manual claims processing takes a long time due to data extraction and subsequent filling of required forms. RPA increases processing speed and maximizes customer experience.

33. Premium renewals: RPA is best suited for automating premium renewals in the insurance industry by programming bots to set a date and send premium notifications without any human intervention.

34. Underwriting: The list of potential clients is underwritten until they become clients. Once confirmed, RPA bots can transfer data from underwriting to a CRM system.

There are common operations that can fit almost any industry. Here is how you can optimize them:

35. Updating inventory records: Inventory management typically involves reconciliation across multiple systems because it is difficult for companies to integrate all their inventory management functions into one system. RPA bots can easily automate this cross-system negotiation and communication.

36. Refund: The refund process is much less streamlined than the company’s more frequent processes, resulting in significant delays and customer dissatisfaction. This is troubling because customers seeking reimbursement are already unhappy, and their dissatisfaction could lead to them sharing their complaints with others, damaging your company’s image.

UiPath worked with a credit reporting firm for eight weeks to automate part of the refund process, reducing manual work by 90%.

37. Compliance: Changing commercial, regulatory, or tax requirements, such as the introduction of VAT in Dubai in 2018, requires businesses to check thousands of records. A UiPath customer, Landmark, has used RPA to process thousands of records.

The logistics industry relies heavily on paperwork and BOMs. Examples of using RPA in the logistics industry and RPA in warehouse management will help you solve the problem in the following ways:

38. Shipment scheduling: RPA bots extract data from letters, memos, and notes associated with a shipment and update the shipment schedule based on this data. This cuts time by almost 50% and ensures fast delivery.

39. Delivery Tracking: RPA software allows you to install bots that can track where the shipment is and alert the system when it reaches certain locations. This reduces the time it takes to update the delivery progress.

40. Delivery notifications: Getting regular delivery updates is a tedious process. RPA can automatically update delivery progress and provide stage completion notifications.

Read more about RPA use cases in supply chain management.

Lyft, a city-based transportation company, is rapidly catching up with Uber in both branding and market share. In 2018 Gil Arditi, Head of Machine Learning Products at Lyft, spoke at a conference about how Lyft is using RPA/AI / ML.

Lyft’s machine learning team is challenged to address many challenges for core and standalone businesses, including spot pricing, trip planning, fleet management, and obstacle avoidance. To solve these problems, the ML team uses various models, including decision trees, neural networks, ARIMA, multi-arm bandits, SVR regression, and quadratic programming. The choice of model depends on the problem being solved and how effectively the model solves the problem at scale.

Real-time decision-making (with features like a user log) meant that traditional feature learning could not scale. Detecting user behavior using a real-time input string differs from a natural language processing (NLP) problem. The interpretability in any deep learning model is lower than in the tree model, but overall it yielded better results (higher accuracy and responsiveness).

Regarding the process, Lyft now has a fully functional AIOps model that helps align all the necessary stakeholders (Data Science, Operations, Software Engineering), ultimately helping to launch new/improved RPA models faster.

Yazdi Balgi, Walmart’s senior vice president of global business services and emerging technology, highlighted several challenges they solve for Walmart’s back-office applications (also called shared services) that he leads. Traditionally, Walmart has taken advantage of automation capabilities such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) that can help with day-to-day office tasks such as digitizing documents. RPA systems use rule-based automation with visual and scripted flowcharts to automate internal service processes.

Walmart’s back office handles 200 million + accounts receivable and 2.3 million + salary employees.

Naturally, even a small improvement in the process with this volume can result in huge savings. They noticed that bottlenecks are usually related to data entry and exception handling. AI is taking RPA to the next level to automate decision-making and improve exception handling. For Walmart, ~ 85% AI accuracy is the starting point for automated decision-making.

In addition, the tasks now seem simple as there is evidence to support the effectiveness of the process. Yazdi gave an example of how RPA, AI, and big data have improved sales tax refunds and auditing processes. Previously, only samples of tax clauses were checked. The sampling led to numerous checks by the government.

AI has helped scan the universe of audits, not just sampled ones.

A full scan of the universe empowers relevant employees to make quantitative and qualitative machine-centric decisions to aid their human judgment or, in many cases, with reasonable accuracy, default machine-driven decisions.

Roy Smythe, chief medical officer of Philips’ Strategy and Partnerships, spoke emotionally about the current state of healthcare and how RPA can help make it more humane.

Traditional healing changed from compassion to faith-based recovery to herbal medicine and led to the creation of what he called a medical industrial complex. Funding and technology development created a vicious circle that led to doctors’ burnout. As a result, primary health care becomes inhuman. 29 out of 36 minutes is spent on documentation (medical records and insurance-related overheads).

“The patient is usually seen only 7 minutes at a time to receive genuine humane care, and this hardly helps to ensure the necessary human interaction, an integral part of the discipline of primary care,” said Smythe

How does RPA help tackle this problem? Roy identifies three areas in which data and analysis can be used to improve the effectiveness of doctors and ultimately enable them to focus on the human dimension of primary healthcare:

• Image recognition/computer vision to help scan X-ray or MRI images and measure lesion sizes, eliminating manual work and error handling
• Data mining to compare patient records with a global database of patients with similar conditions, ages, and even possibly genomic models
• Self-Health AI app that provides health advice (preventive or proactive) that could cut 50% of doctor visits, freeing doctors’ time to tackle the health problems that matter.

In addition to continually improving operational efficiency, RPA has allowed Coca-Cola to increase productivity by moving from an 8-hour workday to a 24-hour workday.

This has been achieved without additional staffing to handle ever-growing jobs.

Existing employees can also focus on more valuable and interesting tasks while improving the customer experience. Improving compliance is another win, as HR audit reports can now be tracked. As the quality of process data improves, new insights will emerge to further enhance the company’s operating performance.

Software robots at AT&T Inc. took on routine, repetitive tasks for employees in various fields, from customer service to finance.

The company currently has over 1,000 software robots deployed, up from roughly 200 in mid-2016, said Steve Stein, AT&T’s chief data officer.

Bots perform various tasks, from helping technicians activate equipment for customers to collecting data for service orders and customer service reports.

AT&T is one of many businesses exploring how humans and robots can work together to save time and money and free employees to do more analysis and knowledge-driven work.

“We really want to put our people in higher positions,” said Mr. Stein.

Software bots are part of an industry called robotic process automation. These software agents reside on the server or in the cloud, mimic human actions to perform a rule-based task, and are usually not artificially intelligent. According to Forrester Research Inc., the so-called robotic process automation market will grow to $ 2.9 billion by 2021, up from $ 250 million in 2016.

RPA software is gradually gaining positions worldwide, and it is possible that market profitability may increase by a double-digit percentage every year.

In addition to the obvious benefits that robotic automation brings to the business, which we mentioned at the beginning of the article, RPA has a faster deployment cycle compared to other workflow automation solutions – business process management and outsourcing platforms.

Looking for RPA development experts and UiPath consultants? Get in touch with Flobotics. Our consultants will analyze your industry and help you plan, map, and develop RPA solutions so you can achieve your business goals cheaper and faster.