Automation through software robots: How do RPA bots work?

RPA robots can act as digital employees to simplify and speed up processes. Here's what's behind this promising technology.

What is an RPA bot?

RPA bots are programmes used in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). These software robots, called bots for short, are programmed and trained to take over various manual processes and complete them more efficiently than humans.

RPA bots are divided into attended bots and unattended bots. Attended bots are often used in "normal" process digitalization. They support your employees in their work and thus facilitate workflows.

Unattended bots are often based on machine learning algorithms and work independently. They carry out activities autonomously and thus in the background, human intervention is rarely necessary.

What tasks can an RPA bot perform?

The software robots are particularly well suited for repetitive and time-consuming processes and activities. These include, among others, these tasks:

• Querying databases, websites and online shops
• Logging into web and enterprise applications
• Following if/then decisions and rules
• Performing complicated calculations
• Extracting structured data from documents
• Repeatedly filling in forms
• Copying and pasting information
• Reading and writing in databases
• Opening emails and attachments
• Researching and scraping data from the internet
• Transferring data between systems
• Collecting statistics from social networks

With these skills, the software bots can be used in different areas. Here is an example of how your company can benefit:

For which business areas are RPA bots suitable?

RPA software or the RPA robots can be used in different business areas. For example in:

Customer service and support

• Assistance with questions
• Advising customers
• Processing feedback
• Sending notifications
• Updating customer profiles

Marketing and distribution

• Updating CRM information
• Creation of offers
• Follow up with prospects
• Reporting for campaigns

Human Resources and Employee Support

• Onboarding of new colleagues
• Automated employee surveys
• Payroll management
• Validation of time records

Finance and accounting

• Extraction of invoice information
• Preparation of data
• Automated invoicing
• Verification of inputs and outputs

Purchasing and procurement

• Validation of orders
• Planning purchases
• Processing of returns
• Management of contracts

IT and data protection

• Incident management,
• migration of large amounts of data
• Automated testing
• IT security monitoring

What does an RPA bot cost?

The price of a software bot depends on various factors, such as your requirements, your technical prerequisites and the frequency of adjustments.

In our experience, a software bot that is fully integrated into your business processes and serves as a digital workforce costs only a third of an employee.

Tip: To keep the costs of operating and maintaining the robots predictable and flexible, you can rent RPA bots from an RPA service provider like CITRO as RPA as a Service. This minimises your internal expenses.