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Three days of predictions, insights, and advice from leaders in finance, sales, HR, supply chain and more
Register now here
By Nilly Essaides, Senior Research Director Finance/EPM at The Hackett Group
According to research conducted by the Hackett Group, the market for robotic process automation (RPA) is real and growing. It has the potential to change the business process outsourcing (BPO) landscape, global business services (GBS) organizations, and broader business-specific processes.
While we can’t predict the future, the market is expected to grow (50%+ through 2020) transforming our idea of automation and service delivery. RPA can be a game changer because it allows companies to achieve remarkable cost savings without having to change their existing technology infrastructure and process design. Anyone (everyone) dealing with legacy systems knows just how valuable that can be.
RPA is about software that sits between other applications or websites and does complex, rule-based work that would typically be done by people. RPA can mimic human interfaces and operate computer systems just like a person would, for example, it can log in and out of an application, copy and paste data or choose from a drop-down menu. It brings the biggest benefit to companies that have a fragmented technology landscape with multiple applications or instances of an ERP.
Two big factors are driving RPA adoption in finance and elsewhere:
RPA has many applications within the finance organization because many finance processes fall within the realm of activities that fit the RPA application model, from tactical bank reconciliation to end-to-end processes such as account-to-report (A2R). There are eight questions finance executives should ask when they consider whether a specific process is ripe for robotic automation:
Some finance processes are particularly suitable for RPA. Take the order-to-cash process. One of its sub-element that has seen a lot of RPA activity is customer billing. It meets the criteria listed above.
In customer billing, the robot can process the general invoice. It can then consolidate the billing information into the right format, transmit the invoice and post the AR transaction.
RPA is in early adoption phase, but it’s showing great promise in the finance space. It’s a quick and high ROI approach to resolving burning issues (bloated process cost, high error rate), as well as a longer-term automation solution to specific process improvement that does not require a complete overhaul of existing process or system architecture.
RPA adoption is forecast to grow by a factor of 10 over the next two-to-three years, according to the Hackett Group 2017 key issues survey. Many finance organizations are already taking advantage of robotics and will lead the next wave of capability improvements and cost savings. Keep these three things in mind when looking at RPA solutions:
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