What processes can Robotic Process Automation Automate?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses software (or commonly known as bots) to automate manual and repetitive tasks to increase speed, accuracy and compliance. This software runs attended or unattended, working as an extension of your team - almost like the RPA robots are your virtual employees!
Traditionally, RPA software has been used to process structured data from multiple, disparate sources, however, the capabilities are expanding with the introduction of Intelligent Automation. Intelligent Automation incorporates emerging technologies including, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to widen the scope of potential tasks and processes that can be automated.
Robotic Automation is transforming the operational efficiency of every business function from, IT, Supply Chain, and Research and Development to HR, Marketing and Sales. We've put together a list of RPA use cases to highlight where companies can reap the immediate benefits of RPA technology.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Information Technology

Onboarding and offboarding - streamline the lengthy process by automating the creation of new user accounts and access rights, allocation of software licenses and removal of authorisations and access rights for offboarded employees.

Server automation – reduce the complexity of manual server management by consolidating tasks and automatically backing up all servers at a predefined time through remote access using set credentials.

Service ticket management – improve customer service and retention by automating ticket creation from email or other events, populating details and assignments to team members as appropriate. Route and flag high priority tickets based on set criteria (e.g., content, user, application, keywords).

Software license management – keep track of software by automating installations to enable single-click deployments of complex systems with independent components, downgrade licenses not being used and reassign licenses dynamically.

Incident response – take the guesswork out of security breaches with an automated incident response that collects security centre alerts, filters for events that can be handled automatically and provides computerised notifications and reports on critical vulnerabilities on current software versions.

Patch management and backup – improve security and free your team of repetitive and time-consuming tasks with the automated rollout of software updates and backup.

Managing users – remove unauthorised users from managing sensitive data by automating user access, monitoring, and audit trail of access to sensitive data.

Threat detection and response – eliminate repetitive tasks and orchestrate your technology, people and process to their full advantage with automated detection and alert notifications, triage and remediation when necessary.

 

Cyber security

Cyber Security

 

 

Procurement

Procurement and Supply Chain

Vendor records – seamlessly monitor and update address change requests coming from vendor submitted through the web, validate on third-party address verification website and synchronise change across multiple systems (e.g. multiple ERPs).

Quote management – automatically request for a quote to suppliers based on set criteria, collate and evaluate quotes and allocate stock items to the chosen vendor.

Inventory record management – automate reconciliation across multiple systems to monitor inventory levels, update inventory with goods receipt data and reorder based on minimum stock levels.

Purchase request to purchase order - ensure a single source of truth for all orders by automating the process of request approval, and process request to produce a purchase order. 

Research data collation – eliminate the manual tasks associated with extracting research data from legacy research reports and consolidate the extracted data.

Experiment administration – simplify the loading of study files into diagnostic software, reporting and filing results from diagnostic software.

R&D

Research and Development

 

Accounting

Finance and Accounting

Accounts payable – accelerate invoice processing with an automated system that processes invoices from scanning, digitising and validating data to uploading the data directly into the desired system.

Accounts receivable and cash management – receive payments sooner by automating customer data setup and management, sales quotation and entry generation, invoice generation and distribution, customer credit monitoring and cash allocation and posting.

Bank statement reconciliation – increase visibility and accuracy by automating data extraction from bank statements to reconcile, compare and validate payments which were once manually done via complex spreadsheets.

Recruitment and onboarding – source, track and hire only the best candidates with automated CV scanning and shortlisting, employee history verification and offer letter generation.

Employee data management – allow your HR employees to focus on the human aspect by handling all of the day-to-day manual tasks of maintaining employee data across systems (i.e. payroll, training, incentives and performance management). 

HR

Human Resources

 

Sales

Sales

Contract management – remove the manual work out of managing multiple contracts by automating the generation of non-disclosure agreements, data extraction from contracts for contract management system use and have them sent and electronically signed quicker.

Pricing calculations – make informed decisions and minimise human error by automating pricing retrieval from supplier portals and performing competitive analysis to find the best price for your offering in the market.

Customer research – improve sales by data scraping from information portals and reports to analyse customer behaviour, demographics and interactions.

Personalised marketing – make your brand stand out by developing tailored marketing communications to prospects based on attributes across systems (e.g. current title, company, tenure, connections).

CRM updates – keep your customer data synchronised across systems by automating a seamless integration that updates gaps in your database based on predefined logic.

Advertisement spend management – get the most out of your budget by implementing RPA to monitor total spending against budgets across platforms and automatically adjust budgets based on predetermined criteria.

 

Marketing

Marketing

Perfect Partner Experience

We operate highly successful and innovative collaborative brain and heart research programs. Our scientific experts drive the success of these programs, which is why it’s so important that they’re focused on high-value research tasks. That's why we engaged The Missing Link to automate the tedious admin tasks required to set up our very specialised MRI software and generate the output reports. The Missing Link's solution enables our staff to spend more time concentrating on high-value tasks that underpin the success of our research programs.

Professor Stuart Grieves | Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney
We’ve built a strong relationship with The Missing Link and have had numerous engagements with them over a number of years. Recently they conducted an RPA discovery session to help us streamline our quoting system, and I must say it was brilliant. They deep dived into our current processes and provided actionable insights for our sales operations team. Our team members are now able to save time, improve efficiency and increase productivity as they concentrate more on valuable tasks rather than mundane activities. The Missing Link is one of our most trusted business partners within the industry, and their team are highly knowledgeable and responsive, I would highly recommend them to anyone looking to kick-start their RPA journey.
Craig Ashwood | General Manager, OrcaTech