Robotic Process Automation use cases

Use our Periodic Table of RPA to learn about possible use cases in your business

Every year, more businesses are using Robotic Process Automation to streamline workflows and free up more of their staff’s time. By automating repetitive tasks like data transference and report compilation, people have more time to innovate, collaborate, and think strategically about their projects.

The benefits of RPA are clear. What isn’t as clear is how you can apply it to your business.

You may read case studies or news reports about how other businesses have applied RPA, but every company’s system architecture is different. What tasks in your company could be automated? And if RPA is so powerful and transformative, where should you apply it inside your organisation?

That’s where we come in…

The Periodic Table of RPA

We created the Periodic Table of RPA to help you find opportunities to apply the technology in your own business. Whether you’re completely new to RPA or you’ve already implemented it in your business and want to make the most of the technology, we’ve identified 74 tasks that are ripe for improvement with the help of RPA.

Multi-Purpose Tasks

• Competitive Pricing and Monitoring
• Customer Due Diligence
• Customer Data Management
• Customer Engagement Communications
• Compliance Reporting
• Sales and Purchase Order Processing
• Refunds and Returns

These tasks should be your first considerations for RPA application. Many tasks have cross-departmental applications, but we’ve found these are the most common and therefore could save your business the most time.

Customer Service Tasks

• Call and Contact Centre Processes
• Service Requests and Scheduling
• Transaction Automation
• Renewal Notices

The more customers you have, the more time RPA could save your organisation. Customers routinely require account access assistance (e.g. updating their email addresses or resetting passwords) and chatbots can be set up to identify questions and provide common answers, with the option of elevating the issue to a human worker if needed.

Customer Onboarding Tasks

• New Customer Applications
• Online Registrations
• New Customer Eligibility
• Upsell Opportunity Reporting
• Customer Welcome Packs
• Customer Retention

Customers enjoy personalised messages and user journeys when they join a platform, which is ideal for RPA implementation. Consider streaming platforms or other companies that provide an algorithm-backed service – when a customer joins and sets up their profile they are asked to select from a menu of preferences/topics/genres so the algorithm can start serving content. The same principle can be applied to many other businesses and parts of the customer onboarding process – using automation to ask for customer preferences and then serving them welcome packs and offers based on their choices.

Marketing Tasks

• Market Intelligence
• Data Management
• CRM Updates
• List Building
• Sales Quote Automation
• Invoice Creation and Distribution
• ERP Automation
• Social Media Monitoring
• Business Intelligence Reporting

Whatever they’re working on, Marketing teams back their creative ideas with reliable data. Data management and gathering market intelligence are two of the most valuable tasks that RPA can accelerate for your Marketing team. Marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management also demand using large amounts of customer data as your team builds email lists for dedicated nurture streams – automating how these customers are sorted into these lists saves valuable time and removes human error.

IT Tasks

• Installations
• Server and Application Monitoring
• File and Document Management
• FTP Management
• User Setup and Configuration
• Application Integration
• Data Aggregation and Migration
• ERP/Other Systems Integration
• Batch Processing

Just as it can in Marketing, RPA can greatly help IT teams gather and interpret a large amount of data. IT teams can also lose valuable time to small tasks that support the rest of the business, such as user setup and solving tech issues. Automating as many of these tasks as possible helps keep your team working on valuable, strategic work while ensuring the rest of the business is still supported.

Supply Chain Tasks

• Supply and Demand Planning
• Inventory Management
• Supplier Portal Integration
• Work Order Management
• Shipment Scheduling and Tracking
• Invoice, Quote and Contract Management
• Freight Management
• After-Sales Handling

Improvements in Machine Learning mean that RPA now has important applications in Supply Chain Management. SCM can benefit from inventory management automation by setting bots to automatically reorder products when stock reaches a set level. Historical data can also be used to predict demand patterns while allowing for spikes in activity.

Finance Tasks

• Vendor Onboarding/Maintenance
• Vendor Portal Queries
• Funds Transfer
• Incentive Claims
• Comparables Pricing
• Collections
• Report Aggregation
• Journal Postings

Removing human error is an important benefit of implementing RPA in a financial organisation. And Gartner estimates that one bot can complete 30 times the work of a human employee, meaning a greater amount of work can be completed with a greater degree of accuracy.

Legal Tasks

• Screening and Risk Management
• IP and Fraud Detection
• Policy Admin and Servicing
• Credential Verification
• Licensing and Registrations
• Outside Affiliations Review
• Periodic Disclosures

Legal tasks are ideal opportunities to show how automation can be used to assist, rather than replace, human work. Staying compliant with legislation is essential to business operation though reviewing the phrasing of documents and contracts is long work filled with interpretation. RPA can accelerate your legal staff’s review procedures while they remain in control of what is approved and what needs flagging as legal risk.

HR Tasks

• Employee History Verification
• Employee Onboarding/Offboarding
• Payroll
• Time and Attendance Management
• Training and Upskilling
• Employee Data Management
• Tax Management
• Benefits and Stocks Admin

Large companies with thousands of staff can save great amounts of time with RPA by automating elements of their HR. Initial opportunities can be focused on financial tasks, including payroll and tax management, although the onboarding and upskilling side of HR should not be overlooked. Bots could be customised so they cater to different training needs and manage a wide range of data loads (which will naturally differ between departments and teams).

Vendor Management Tasks

• Vendor Sourcing
• Vendor Qualification
• Vendor Onboarding/Offboarding
• Vendor Reviews
• Vendor Portal Integration
• Vendor Agreement Maintenance
• Contract Monitoring and Enforcing
• Vendor Performance Management

RPA can accelerate your vendor review, selection, and onboarding processes, meaning you spend less time talking about work and more time getting it done. Compliance risks can also be identified quickly against regulations at multiple levels (local, national, international etc.) as well as against your internal policies.