What is robotic process automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation (RPA) takes repetitive tasks off your team's plate, freeing people to focus on work that matters – and boosting productivity and accuracy along the way.

What is robotic process automation?

RPA meaning and definition
Benefits of RPA
How does RPA work?
RPA use cases and examples
Successful RPA implementation
Stronger together: AI and RPA
Future of RPA
What to look for in RPA solutions
FAQs

Robotic process automation (or RPA) has evolved from a centuries-long desire for greater efficiency and productivity. From the first assembly lines to the powerful cloud solutions we use today, a priority has been to standardize processes and automate workflows. Where early industrial technologies relied on mechanical and physical automation to interact with the external world, RPA automates digitally, from within your systems. With unprecedented speed, it handles the complex and repetitive tasks that go on behind the scenes – enabling every ATM withdrawal, online hotel booking, password reset, or appointment reminder. And when it’s enriched with advanced AI and analytics, RPA’s enterprise capabilities become truly exceptional.

RPA meaning and definition

Robotic process automation is a technology that uses software “robots” or bots to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks. RPA software bots can be programmed to execute any activity that follows a well-defined sequence of actions, including interacting with digital systems and executing simple business processes. Because robotic process automation can complete manual, time-consuming tasks in a fraction of the time, it dramatically speeds up common business processes and gives humans more time to focus on activities that add strategic value.

Top 6 benefits of robotic process automation

RPA has many benefits, especially in areas requiring intensive manual data entry, document processing, or cross-system updates.

Tireless speed and efficiency

Unlike humans, bots don’t need to be mentally focused in order to complete tasks quickly. Plus, virtual robots can work around the clock, meaning these activities can be carried out in minutes or hours rather than days or even weeks.

Significant cost savings

Robotic process automation helps to minimize the hours and expenses taken up by handling repetitive manual tasks, allowing you to invest in more value-added work.

Improved accuracy and compliance

Even the most fastidious team members will make mistakes or miss things when faced with mountains of detailed tasks. Bots can help to tackle this, reducing the risks and non-compliance issues associated with errors.

Enhanced employee satisfaction

By minimizing the need to handle mindless and tedious work, RPA allows employees to enjoy more variety and challenge in their work. This nurtures creativity and ideas and also boosts satisfaction and engagement.

Better customer experience

RPA robots and chatbots can help deliver faster, more consistent service. For example, they can answer frequent questions, escalate complex issues to the right person, and automatically track orders and notify customers.

Cost-effective digitalization

RPA reduces the need for paper-based documents and automates manual actions without requiring major changes to existing systems or custom APIs. This means faster digitization with a lower investment compared to other methods.

How does RPA technology work?

RPA works by emulating human interactions with digital systems – by clicking buttons, copying information, or entering data, for example. Bots are then configured or programmed to follow predefined logic and rules that replicate these actions to carry out cyclical business tasks and workflows, such as batch-processing invoices. They can log in to apps, fill out forms, process transactions, and much more.

RPA works across different types of software and systems without needing deep integration or system modifications, making it easy for businesses to deploy and use. Robotic process automation tools also provide logs of their work as well as analytics so that workflows can be optimized over time.

RPA use cases and examples

RPA is ideal in cases where it can extract, copy, and enter the same types of data from one system to another, such as in payroll processes. It is also great at collecting data from emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and legacy systems and then migrating it to other systems or structured databases. Below are just a few of the many use cases where RPA excels:

Finance and accounting

RPA streamlines a wide range of tasks – including aggregating data, generating audit-ready financial reports, processing expense reimbursements, and automating loan workflows.

Healthcare

Bots are able to automate important activities such as verifying and approving insurance claims. It also excels at extracting and automatically updating patient records across systems.

Manufacturing

RPA is at work in manufacturing and supply chain processes such as tracking stock levels, automating purchase orders, monitoring logistics, and shipment details in real time.

Procurement

Vendor onboarding and compliance checks can be streamlined. And purchase order (PO) processing is made faster and more accurate by automatically creating, validating, and routing POs for approval.

Insurance

RPA accelerates administrative processes such as policy renewals, updates, and cancellations. It can also verify claim data, validate documents, and even process claim payments.

HR

RPA streamlines activities from onboarding to document verification and assigning training to new hires. It also simplifies payroll tasks such as salary calculation, taxation, and benefits.

IT and customer support

At support and service desks, RPA can be put to work handling routine inquiries, updating accounts, and classifying tickets for IT and customer service requests.

Accounting

During general ledger reconciliation processes, robotic automation can match transactions and detect errors – preparing compliant tax reports faster and more accurately than ever.

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Best practices and tools for a successful RPA implementation

To avoid growing pains when introducing robotic process automation technology into workplaces, consider some of these common obstacles as well as the tools and best practices to help you overcome them.

Choosing the right processes to start automating is key to maximizing your ROI and facilitating a smooth implementation. Remember that candidates for RPA are high-volume, rule-based, and repetitive, with minimal exceptions. You will be able to automate increasingly complex tasks over time, but it’s best to start with the most obvious processes at first.
Bots are amazing. They are tireless, accurate, and useful. But they’re not a magic bullet or a replacement for the skills, instinct, experience, and innovation of your people. When incorporating RPA into your processes, be sure to include your teams in the process. Let them help you discover which processes are best automated, and where they can best redirect their talents.
Start with small pilot projects first, allowing teams to get used to the technology, learn, and refine their approach. As their confidence and capabilities grow, organizations can then scale RPA across departments with help from centralized tools that can handle bot orchestration, monitoring, and maintenance.
Proper governance is also pivotal. For example, the best RPA software allows you to set up a centralized monitoring framework to oversee the deployment, configuration, scheduling, and monitoring of all your RPA processes. It gives insight into bot activities in real time to ensure they perform as intended and to let you intervene quickly if needed.

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Stronger together: AI and RPA technology

While RPA is exceptional at automating process-driven, structured tasks, it becomes even more powerful when combined with smart, data-driven technologies like artificial intelligence. Coupled with AI, RPA can tackle more complex, decision-based processes, adapt to exceptions, and interact with unstructured data.

This intelligent process automation draws on machine learning (ML), which allows bots to learn from historical data, make smarter predictions, and improve over time. Natural language processing also lets RPA bots understand and process human language to help automate tasks like reading emails, interpreting text documents, or responding to customer inquiries.

RPA can also be paired with cognitive technologies, such as optical character recognition (OCR) and speech recognition. This allows bots to extract meaning from images, scanned documents, and voice commands, allowing for the end-to-end automation of once manual processes.

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Future of RPA

Looking ahead, robotic process automation (RPA) will become smarter, more intuitive, and more proactive, thanks to advancements in AI and analytics. Bots will increasingly identify automation opportunities on their own, spotting patterns in processes to suggest specific ways tasks can be streamlined or optimized.

RPA bots will also integrate closely with intelligent document processing and workflow tools, allowing them to manage more complex and dynamic tasks, like automatically handling exceptions, improving data accuracy, or proactively flagging compliance risks. Instead of merely following instructions, future bots will provide practical recommendations on precisely how, where, and when to automate – making digital operations leaner and smarter across the entire organization.

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What to look for in RPA solutions

The best RPA solutions tend to be integrated into a larger automation ecosystem that includes AI, analytics, workflow orchestration, and business process management – unlocking smarter, end-to-end process automation. Solutions that offer low-code or no-code platforms allow business users to design, deploy, and manage their automation technologies with minimal technical expertise, accelerating time to value. Managed RPA services can be a great option for organizations that want to deploy RPA faster and offload maintenance, monitoring, and scaling.

Centralized cloud platforms for configuring and managing RPA workflows can help prevent uncontrolled bot deployments and automation activities while ensuring deployments align with business objectives and compliance policies. Look for features such as device registration, robot credential management, and task monitoring.

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See how Infor’s RPA software can improve your organization’s overall productivity and free up your teams for higher-value tasks.

Infor Robotic Process Automation

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What is robotic process automation (RPA)?