By Mary E. Shacklett – Gartner describes hyper-automation as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible”.

Let’s take a look at how to implement one element of hyper-automation: robotic process automation, or RPA.

By the end of this year, Gartner, projects, the RPA market will exceed $2.9 billion, so we know that companies are using RPA. The use cases where RPA is playing an important role include:

• System integration in places where there was none. In the past, employees had to repetitively re-key the same information into multiple systems because those systems weren’t integrated. RPA automation is particularly well suited to this manual re-keying task. It can “scrape” basic information from an invoice and apply it to otherwise non-integrated systems, so employees don’t have to manually rekey data into each system.
• RPA can also do the little things, like being able to maintain a special “deal” price on an order for a customer, even though pricing has changed in general; or being able to expedite the accounting department’s month-end close process by taking the data from a single Excel spreadsheet and pasting it into multiple of different accounting systems automatically.

In each case, RPA can perform back-office “grunt work,” allowing staff to focus on more skills-based functions. That saves process time while reducing the number of errors that humans inadvertently introduce in repetitive work. Read On: