3 Benefits of Automating RPA Compliance Activities
Robotic process automation (RPA) is quickly transforming middle-and back-office operations across many industries. Robots are at the heart of RPA and are being used to automate workflows and decision-making by mimicking rule-based processes. By embracing complexity and leveraging this technology, organizations are accelerating their corporate performance.
As organizations expand their automation efforts, compliance stands out as a strong candidate. From an enterprise perspective, the realm of compliance involves an adherence to laws, policies, and regulations that are designed to maintain data integrity, data security, and safeguard the privacy of employees and customers. The processes to maintain these compliance standards are typically stable, rule-based, require structured inputs, manual, and repetitive in nature - the ideal scenario for robotic automation.
Leveraging RPA in compliance process activity can lead to a number of benefits, including expanded resource capacity, improved outcomes through greater quality and consistency, reduced remediation efforts, and lowered costs.
Here are 3 ways RPA can enable compliance modernization at your organization:
1. More efficient and effective compliance management processes
Several aspects of compliance operations can be enhanced through RPA implementation. RPA's capability to pull and aggregate data from multiple sources can enhance the efficiency of regulatory reporting as it reduces time spent collecting, compiling, and summarizing large amounts of information.
Further, RPA makes it easy to map policies and controls to business rules, procedures, and processes ensuring automation work is compliant. Blueprint enables users to use trace relationships to relate critical information to business processes for automation, mitigating re-work, and non-compliance.
2. Refocus employee activities on higher-value activities
Traditionally, compliance teams execute a portfolio of individual tests to determine if their operations are compliant with specific rules, laws, and regulations, and then adjust internal policies accordingly. A large organization can be responsible for executing thousands of these types of tests.
Each test requires planning, document/evidence gathering, test execution, and reporting. Applying RPA to repetitive and manually intensive activities like monitoring and testing helps improve employee engagement. Employee activities can be refocused on activities such as judgment-based monitoring and testing and quality assurance.
3. Improved auditing
An audit can occur at any time, so it's critical that employee activities are properly tracked, traced, and monitored. However, this process likely will never be 100 percent accurate simply due to human error, but because automated processes save their actions into an activity log, companies are prepared with an audit trail that accurately depicts which processes were executed and how, when exceptions were generated, and the ways in which employees intervened to deal with the issues.
Scaled RPA to manage compliance
It's worth keeping in mind that RPA is not a 'one-tool-fix-all' activity, it's critical you start with a plan and curb your expectations. To effectively scale RPA, you must establish visibility into the business processes that are being run in your compliance and risk management efforts.
Solutions like Blueprint give you end-to-end visibility into your business processes within a unified platform. This enables your organization to incorporate compliance and risk management controls with greater accuracy and ensures your automations are being developed to meet regulatory standards. In addition, because your automations' actions are defined within Blueprint, a non-repudiable audit trail is created and saved in a centralized repository, making it easy to track changes.
To learn how Blueprint can help you manage regulatory compliance in automation effectively, as well as scale your RPA efforts, download the Blueprint Business Transformation Platform datasheet.