What are the disadvantages of RPA?

Robotic Process Automation is a software robot used by many businesses today. It is widely applied in many fields: insurance, customer care, …. This smart solution brings us many benefits, contributing to solving the difficulties that businesses are facing. In addition to the good aspects of RPA, it also has some disadvantages that negatively affect your automation process. The following article will introduce you to 6 limitations of RPA that you need to know.

6 disadvantages of RPA

Attrition

Attrition is understood as a centralized resource for businesses. However, Robotic Process Automation can effectively solve the work in the automated system of the enterprise. But it cannot replace humans completely.

For tasks with fixed logic, it makes perfect sense to use RPA. As the workload increases, we can add more bots to take care of the work. Businesses will not have to hire additional staff to handle it. That will have a significant impact on some office staff.

Tasks such as data entry and labeling are often simple and do not require a high level of skill to complete. Therefore, Software Robots will replace humans to solve them better and faster.

Accordingly, there will be a large number of workers facing job loss.

Srawing technology

As workloads increase, businesses will need more bots to perform more tasks. They run the risk of creating a collection of bots that are cumbersome and unwieldy if not properly managed. So, The companies will have to spend a lot of money to manage and maintain the bots.

Therefore, you should consider carefully before increasing the number of bots. Enterprises should have a clear management system to better control RPA’s operational processes. Don’t let a technology solution become a burden on your company. Work on quality, not quantity.

Added complexity

One of the prominent disadvantages of RPA is Added complexity. However, RPA makes it easy for businesses to change business processes. It makes it easier for them to make changes step-by-step rather than systematically updating the software. If something goes wrong, RPA makes it difficult to fix the problem. Because it is a process, when a step is bad, it will take a lot of time to heal.

Magnification of problematic processes

It can be said that the Magnification of complex processes is the defect with the biggest consequences of RPA. It can disrupt your entire automated process system, causing a variety of errors. The main reason is that businesses do not carefully consider the process before putting it into operation.

When businesses do not test and optimize processes thoroughly before automating them, there is a risk of automated processes having problems. This will lead to errors in succession. The failure of such a system will amplify the RPA’s mistakes and make them more difficult to control. More importantly, it affects work productivity, and aggregated data will not be accurate. In addition, the carelessness of businesses will cost them a great deal to remedy the consequences.

Thwarted transformation

Executives see RPA as a software assistant in a certain department in a large process. That will help optimize the process, get more benefits than limitations. Leaders want software robots to support their digitalization goals. Businesses must have specific strategic plans, prioritizing their automation projects. At the same time, they must understand those projects in order to make an accurate judgment of how well they fit with their overarching strategic vision.

Lack of creativity

In a way, we will see the lack of creativity in RPA. It can only understand programming languages, not humans. Therefore, in some jobs, RPA will be somewhat limited compared to other technologies. But overall, Robotic Process Automation is still doing its job well. To scale up for RPA, we should combine with other technologies such as process Mining, BPM, …

How to Avoid RPA’s disadvantages?

We should distribute a reasonable amount of RPA. To avoid an explosion in numbers that leads to loss of control of RPA bots, prepare a clear, tight bot management system to operate the automation process at its best.

Businesses should have a clear division of work for each department. For logical repetitive tasks, we should use RPA to solve them. But, you need to avoid overdoing it to avoid losing control. Add manual labor to these jobs to balance the benefits and risks. This also helps companies with automated process systems operate most efficiently. At the same time, it also creates jobs for some low-skilled departments.

Test the process thoroughly before putting it into automation because carelessness will have extremely serious consequences for businesses. In addition, reviewing the process before operation also helps to minimize errors and improve labor productivity.

We should use some more technology to scratch our automation process. Because that combination will help RPA work more effectively, avoiding unnecessary risks.

Conclusion

Above are 6 disadvantages of RPA and how to overcome those conditions. Whenever you want to use RPA in your system, we should thoroughly understand its weaknesses. However, as you know, the number of disadvantages is only a fraction of the advantages of Robotic Process Automation. Of course, if we do not prepare well before applying RPA to the system, your process will likely be in trouble. That will cost you a lot of time to improve and have a heavy economic impact on your business.

Winactor is the RPA technology solution of NTT DATA – the No. 1 IT corporation in Japan. In 2015, the group introduced WinActor products to the international market. In a short time, software robots have achieved impressive achievements and rose to become the leading RPA solution in the Japanese market. 

In order to centrally manage and control a large number of WinActors, NTT DATA has researched and developed WinDirector.

This tool allows to plan, manage and execute multiple WinActors concurrently.

Accordingly, WinDirector promotes the highest efficiency if your business wants to centrally manage a large number of WinActor (about more than 10 licenses).

Thanks to its outstanding features, WinActor has been trusted by more than 6000 businesses worldwide.

If you have not found a perfect RPA product, RPA will be a reliable suggestion.