Robotic Process Automation use cases

Use our Periodic Table to identify RPA use cases in your business

Every year, more businesses use Robotic Process Automation to streamline workflows and free up their staff’s time. Automating repetitive tasks like data transference and report compilation means people have more time to innovate and collaborate.

The benefits of automation are clear. However, what isn’t as clear is which RPA use cases are right for 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 should you automate? 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

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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, here are 74 RPA use cases for you to consider applying to your own organisation.

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. Automating these tasks can reap massive rewards in the field of Healthcare, where streamlining a patient’s ability to manage appointments and repeat prescriptions can dramatically reduce wait times.

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 creates their profile, the system asks them to choose preferences, topics, and genres. This helps the algorithm provide relevant content.

You can apply the same principle to many parts of the customer onboarding process. Automation can gather a customer’s preferences and provide them with welcome packs and offers tailored to 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.

Marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management need a lot of customer data. Your team uses this data to create email lists for special nurture streams. Automating the sorting of these customers saves valuable time and eliminates 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 lose valuable time to small tasks that support the rest of the business, such as user setup and solving tech issues.

Automating these tasks helps your team focus on important work. This also ensures the rest of the business gets support.

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 benefits from inventory management automation by setting bots to reorder products when stock reaches a set level. You can use historical data 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. Gartner estimates that one bot can complete 30 times the work of a human employee, meaning a greater amount of work can be completed to a higher 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.

Which RPA use cases should you implement?

Before you choose your first process (or handful of processes) to use in your RPA transformation, there are some key ways you can prioritise your opportunities to ensure you’re delivering meaningful impact to your organisation and making the most of the benefits that automation can bring to your business.

Regulatory impact

This is especially important for organisations in financial and legal services — you may have to implement your automation ahead of specific regulatory deadlines. Naturally, those deadlines cannot be changed. You may be relying on temporary staff and there needs to be a strategic decision to help understand whether you are going to invest in automation and achieve your target dates within a given period so you don’t have to fall back to temporary or bank staff. You need to know whether you can automate a process and commit to the dates required. If there are other processes which are ‘nice to have’ but, realistically, your teams are staying on top of them, those should not be prioritised.

Growth goals

Automation is a fantastic way of making existing team members more effective through automated assistance. Automated co-pilots can be designed to perform those behind-the-scenes activities which take a significant amount of time. When factoring in growth targets, there can be significant pressure from the top down, particularly from C-level executives. Understanding their aspirations for the business and where the business hopes to go are important factors for knowing which automation opportunities to prioritise.

MoSCoW system

MoSCoW helps you determine what your automated systems Must, Should, Could, and Will Not have. When you have identified your automation opportunities, complete a MoSCoW table based on your business needs and compare them to your budgets and timescales. Think about where you are going to get the most value from your efforts within the time you have, and which opportunities may work as a ‘proof of concept’ for further investment in RPA should they prove successful.

Read more of our expert advice to prioritise automation opportunities in your organisation.