Four surprising ways to automate daily work tasks with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

30 March 2021

3 min read

Busywork isn’t good for anyone, especially if you are a person who should be busy performing other, more high-priority work.

Yet, for many of us, there are repetitive tasks we must complete to make it through our workday.

That’s why robotic process automation (RPA) coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) is such a transformative automation technology. It frees us from the monotonous tasks that prevent us from getting to higher-value work.

Imagine your workday and the manual tasks you must perform regularly. How could RPA assist you? Here are a few useful benefits of RPA that may inspire you to adopt it in your workplace. Gartner predicts that by 2024, automation software will replace 69% of a manager’s workload (link resides outside ibm.com).

 

1. Create and use a digital assistant for customer service

Imagine a use case centered around a healthcare call center worker. That worker’s core mission is to field complaints and requests from patients and assure customer satisfaction by resolving issues in the most accurate and fastest manner possible. But, at the same time, this worker is required to enter call status reports into three different systems and search three different databases to find an answer for the patient in real time. This can quickly become overwhelming. 

RPA tools are a great solution for this situation. An AI-powered digital assistant can use RPA bots to automate the status report data entry work and health claims queries in the background. This enables RPA to streamline workflows so associates can focus on getting quick resolutions and, ideally, more positive customer experiences for each patient. 

2. Automate compliance requirements

Here in Brazil, there is a legal mandate that requires employees to keep track of work time by clocking in and clocking out at least four times a day (work start, lunch break, lunch break end, work end). To accomplish this, we use a desktop user interface which requires that you type your employee identification into your computer. Why not start the day by outsourcing this task to your digital assistant? With RPA, you can configure your software robot to clock in when a given event occurs (for example, when the computer turns on) and configure a one-click clock out at the end of the day. This trivial task is now automated, saving you time and energy, which adds up over time.

3. Transcribe and summarize meetings

Perhaps you are responsible for back-office work like distributing the minutes of a recorded meeting to a broad audience. You may have taken notes during the meeting, or you may have forgotten some of the important details and must listen to the recording to write them down. Either way, this can be a time-consuming process.

With RPA software, your digital assistant could both transcribe and summarize the meeting for you if you program the software bot to use AI text summarization models and leverage Natural Language Understanding software. And, even if your meeting tool already has a recording transcription capability, you can still use RPA to summarize the text for you. This significantly optimizes your productivity because 70% of your work is already done. Thanks to the power of intelligent automation, the only thing left for you to do is review, sharpen and distribute the minutes so you can concentrate on more important items.

4. Research and build reports

For many of us, especially those in the financial services industry, researching and creating reports is one of the most mundane and tedious tasks we face. Yet, they present another great RPA use case. For example, different reports are often due at different times. Frequently, the report data must be sourced from systems that don’t communicate with each other and then prepared in a format that can be easily understood. 

RPA can eliminate much of this busywork. It can feed curated data to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to automate report or chart creation, even from systems that do not export to Excel. By implementing RPA, you can produce reports sourced from data in different systems once a week, monthly or whenever needed. Your automation platform can even set up business processes in advance to gather the data needed for the report and analyze it. You are then free to focus on value-add work — such as drawing conclusions and developing strategies — instead of spending the bulk of your time merely building reports. 

Try robotic process automation yourself

If you haven’t had hands-on experience with RPA solutions, it can be quite amazing to see how a digital assistant can accelerate your workday and your company’s business operations. Why not give it a test drive and start your organization’s digital transformation now? Simply register here and try IBM® Robotic Process Automation at no cost for 30 days. 

Author

Joberto Diniz

Offering Manager, Robotic Process Automation

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IBM Robotic Process Automation is software that aims to automate repetitive and time-consuming back-office tasks by using software robots that emulate human actions on a computer. It forms part of IBM’s solution for business automation.

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