RPA examples in companies: what to automate and what not to

Common examples in companies

• Entering invoices into the accounting program. The amount, supplier and date are read and loaded into the system.
• Creating customers or suppliers. The data arriving through a form is copied into the ERP, and a warning is raised if a mandatory field is missing.
• Downloading reports. Every morning, sales or stock data is downloaded from a portal and left in a shared folder.
• Simple reconciliation. Bank movements are matched against issued invoices to mark the ones that agree.
• Alerts and follow-up. If an order stays in one status longer than expected, the person in charge is notified.

The practical rule: if a person can do the task by always following the same steps, an RPA can do it. If it requires judgement based on context, it cannot.

What is not RPA

An RPA does not understand a natural-language email or decide whether an invoice is correct. That is done by a systems integration or, when texts or varied documents need interpreting, by an artificial intelligence model. In practice, many projects combine all three: the RPA moves the data, the integration connects it to the ERP and AI reads what has no fixed format.

When RPA makes sense

• The task repeats every day or every week with the same steps.
• The system has no API, or a direct integration would be expensive.
• The human error in that task has a cost you can measure.

Before automating, check that the process is well defined. Automating a disorganised process only makes the disorder faster.

Where to start

Choose one repetitive task, measure it for a week and decide whether the saving justifies the work. In our process automation service we run that diagnosis before proposing any tool, because the best solution is often an integration rather than a robot.