Using Robotic Process Automation for competitor research
Successful businesses invest considerable time and resources in determining what their competitors are up to. What are they selling? What strategies and tactics have they implemented? What’s trending? Organizations need data and business intelligence to answer these important questions. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a relatively new tool that offers a more efficient and cost-effective way to gather business intelligence than traditional market research techniques. Let’s take a look at its practical implications. Read more: How RPA is changing your role in the workplace
RPA in a nutshell When you implement RPA, you train “bots” to perform the same sequences of tasks that your employees perform on their computers. These aren’t physical robots like the ones on manufacturing assembly lines or on your favorite sci-fi show. Bots are snippets that wait for an email, online sale, alert, or other digital event, and then they compare their training instructions with the situation at hand to decide what to do. For example, a bot can be trained to check incoming emails for purchase orders, automatically process orders under $1,000, and send larger orders to a person for approval. Bots accurately type, click, copy, paste, compare values, and navigate through web pages and other software up to fifteen times faster than humans… and they cost much less. You can even integrate bots with voice and handwriting recognition, natural language processing engines, chatbots, machine learning solutions, and other software to expand their abilities into territory that was considered “humans-only” when this decade began. Your talent workforce will spend less time copying and collecting information, and will have more time to drive sales, craft creative business solutions, and perform other tasks that add increased value to your organization.