When it comes to Robotic Process Automation, five popular myths are widely known as truth in the world. This article will examine these myths one by one and replace them with facts. So, let’s begin with the first myth:

Myth 1: Robots Will Take Our Jobs

Nearly everyone working in the RPA field has encountered this legend many times. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that this is the most common myth among all the myths.

Robots are great virtual assistants that support us in doing mundane tasks, leaving us humans to use our precious energy on cognitive decisions. Robots exist to increase our efficiency and effectiveness, not to replace us. Moreover, we can say that some professions will not exist after automation, but new career fields will also emerge.

According to McKinsey’s Future of Business Report, there will be an additional 3.1 million jobs by 2030 thanks to automation, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies. So there is no need to worry; it is enough to keep up with the change.

According to the 2019 Forbes Insights report, employees’ satisfaction rate who use RPA in the workplace is 92%. While RPA automates routine and repetitive tedious work, it also offers other business opportunities. In this context, many different job opportunities such as RPA analyst, developer, and RPA operations manager appeared in front of employees who wanted to take innovative steps in their career journey.

So far, we have looked at transformation through the employees’ perspective. Let us share some data from the managers’ perspective: 61% of managers say they are actively redesigning their current positions around artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in a recent Deloitte survey.

Let’s continue with the next myth.

Myth 2: Robots don’t make mistakes

People new to the RPA generally assume that robots do not make mistakes. So let’s examine this statement a little bit.

Even if a robot does precisely the same as the RPA developer wants, it will do a task a thousand times wrong if programmed incorrectly. In other words, the wrongly configured robot will make a mistake with unfailing accuracy.

Let’s exemplify the fact that robots can make mistakes too:

Suppose you are preparing executive reports in a company’s reporting unit. Your process should be to pull sales data from a website, consolidate that data into an internal application, and then send the report to managers using data visualization tools. Let’s assume that the currency of data that always comes in USD is changed to Euro. If the RPA developer doesn’t set up a control mechanism, this process will work incorrectly by the robot in a chain and will process data in Euros like USD. At this point, as we have mentioned before, the importance of the RPA developer who designed the process becomes apparent.

Let’s move on to our next myth.

Myth 3: RPA is suitable only for cost reduction.

The most important of the benefits of RPA is the cost advantage, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. RPA technology has many other vital advantages besides its price advantage:

RPA Increases Operational Efficiency
Robots work faster than humans. Therefore, they eliminate delays by eliminating the complacency created by repetitive and monotonous work.

RPA Increases Employee Productivity
Robots eliminate the unnecessary workload on employees, enabling them to focus on their expertise and provide a value-added workforce to their organizations.

RPA Eliminates Human Errors
Robots perform the designed workflow continuously and without errors. On the other hand, when people do something in monotonous repetitions, the rate of making mistakes increases.

RPA Improves Service Quality
Fast customer support is directly proportional to quality and satisfaction. Therefore, when you automate even a tiny part of the service you provide to your customers with RPA, you will instantly observe an increase in service quality and satisfaction.

RPA is Scalable
The scalability of RPA is a critical benefit for most organizations. For example, suppose you want to enlarge your current business. In that case, you can deploy new robots quickly for either no extra or minimal cost, and you can expect absolute consistency in job performance.

Myth 4: RPA is only valid for simple tasks.

At the beginning of your digitization journey, it is best to start with simple scenarios so that RPA technology can become widespread and understood within your organization. Therefore, teams that maintain repetitive and possibly more complex business processes within your organization will be revealed. Thanks to its flexibility that does not require any integration, RPA can automate much more complex business processes by combining artificial intelligence technologies with different technologies such as natural language processing and OCR. This integration will multiply the benefits of automating business processes.

Myth 5: RPA is expensive.

There are many different purchasing models for RPA today. RPA providers aim to introduce RPA to companies on digital transformation, with many different payment types such as “licensing,” “periodic rental,” and “pay-as-you-go.”

If you can correctly identify and implement your organization’s automated process, the investment costs will quickly turn into financial benefits. While calculating the return on investment in RPA, it would be helpful to add the increase of performance after the decrease in the repetitive and boring workload of the employees.

Conclusion

RPA is a technology that can benefit any organization, large or small, on the path to digital transformation.

Robots will not take our jobs; on the contrary, they will create new job opportunities for us. For example, industry-specific RPA developers will be needed so that robots do not perform faulty business processes.

Well-designed RPA processes will enable companies to reduce their costs. In addition, with artificial intelligence technologies developing day by day, RPA will become more intelligent and will be able to perform more complex processes.

With these developing technologies, the cost of RPA for companies will decrease day by day, and the return on investment will increase.

Are you ready to start your RPA journey? Request a demo from our expert team to discover automation solutions tailored for your organization.