RPA UseCases
1. Purchase invoice processing and entry to an accounting system
- What: Rule-based automation is a nightmare to maintain. To successfully automate invoices, you'll need to be posting invoices to the accounting system with the correct details. Use EE’s (Encoding Enhancer’s )bot to predict the correct GL account for a new invoice line item, maybe added with cost centre and VAT category (that too often goes missing with OCR).
- Why: Faster invoice payments, less repetitive work, fewer errors. Automation can reduce processing times up to 60-80%!
- For who: Accounting and finance teams in any larger enterprise.
2. Predict payment times for sales invoices
- What: Create an automation to predict the "buckets" when each sales invoice will likely to be paid: early, on time, a bit late, a lot late. This allows accounts receivables team to act in a timely matter.
- Why: Better prediction accuracy to cashflow planning. Mitigate and act early on likely delayed payments.
- For who: Finance and account receivables teams in any enterprise with a big volume of sent invoices.
3. Identify duplicate entries in CRM
- What: Various data entry types from system to another is a staple for RPA automation, CRM being one of them. EE’s bot can be used to improve the quality of data at the entry stage, for example by identifying potential duplicates in CRM entries.
- Why: Increased data accuracy, and less manual work fixing the problems.
- For who: Sales and marketing and master data teams
4. Categorise and prioritise customer service (or help desk) tickets
- What: Common problem for many teams that deal with tickets or requests: how to add metadata such as categories and urgencies to the tickets, so that responses can be better orchestrated? While your RPA or customer service platform takes care of the orchestration, EE’s bot can be the real-time "tagger" that adds labels, categories and urgencies to your tickets based on how your human workers have done in the past.
- Why: Faster and more accurate responses to tickets keep customers happy, or at least as satisfied as possible.
- For who: Customer service and help desk teams.
5. Amend customer orders with properly categorised service details
- What: This is a bit of niche among other cases, but the impact is potentially so massive that it found it's way to the list. When receiving customer service orders, sometimes paid additional services are not correctly marked at the order time, and details are later amended and manually processed based on delivery team markings. EE’s bot can automate the process by predicting additional service that needs to be added to invoice based on written details.
- Why: Increase the revenue by capturing the services that would otherwise go un-invoiced.
- For who: Service delivery teams for example in logistics.
6. Automate product data management in retail/eCommerce
- What: Proper tagging of each product is critical for modern retail and eCommerce solutions. Create an automation that looks for new products, missing tags, and uses EE’s bot to predict the likely labels based on product details automatically. Use high confidence predictions without human review, and send the rest for validation. This tireless automation learns from every review made by your staff.
- Why: By ensuring the product data is complete, you'll make sure every product is available for purchase and properly promoted.
- For who: Product management teams in eCommerce and retail.
7. Travel and expense claim processing automation
- What: This is actually not very different to the #1 on our list, but as I firmly believe every expense claim is time wasted, I chose to include the use case here too. Your workflow can scan the receipts and extract entities, or get details from credit card records. Nevertheless, categories, cost centers and labels ("internal", "billable" etc.) are needed for claims to be processed and stored, and that is where EE’s bot can help by predicting them based on past entries.
- Why: Because everybody hates expense claims.
- For who: Accounting/finance and travel management teams.
8. Automate customer invoicing
- What: If you have devices deployed to your customers and get usage data (telemetry) that are the basis of invoices, you may be in for some time savings. Instead of manually reviewing the invoices, EE’s bot can predict which invoices are likely to be ok and can be sent automatically, and which ones to hold for manual review.
- Why: To save time in mundane tasks and make your employees happier.
- For who: Accounting/finance teams.
9. Time record validation in consulting business
- What: More hours are marked to client projects, more revenue consulting business will make. But consultants are generally bad at marking their hours (at least I was!). Automation helps. Create an automation that looks through the marked records in customer projects, uses EE’s bot to predict anomalies. This should alert the account manager and likely culprits to add the missing hours.
- Why: To increase bottom line.
- For who: Consulting business leaders.
10. Cross-sell automation of insurance products
- What: You've got that customer in with the first product, but what then? You are creating elaborate rules of what to sell next. Take a predictive approach! Let EE’s bot predict the most likely customers who do not have a particular insurance product, but have a profile that statistically indicates they should have it. Test sell and feed the results back to EE’s bot for increased accuracy.
- Why: Increase customer life cycle value - more revenue.
- For who: Sales automation teams
Apart from the benefits listed above, each of the use cases helps you to keep the work of your own staff motivating by reducing the repetitive no-brains tasks, and make the days more meaningful. That alone is a huge benefit, and so attainable with the tools available today!