The Importance of Data Cleansing and Pre-Robotics Solutions for RPA

Robotics can transform your business by boosting productivity, removing discrepancies, and improving work quality across the board. By automating repetitive processes, you can relieve your human workforce from time-consuming admin, giving them freedom to create, design and innovate. On top of that, bots can deliver non-stop output (bots never sleep). And with much easier implementation than traditional automation – at a fraction of the cost – the results are almost instant.

RPA can deliver quick wins for companies wanting to improve efficiency or reduce costs. But to get the most from your RPA software in the long-run, you will need to provide your bots with clean, structured, high quality data. Here, we discuss how data cleansing should be every company’s priority, and how pre-robotics solutions can help you get your business fully robotics-ready.

High quality vs low quality data

Having high quality data is critical if you want RPA deployment to be seamless. Clean and high-quality data should be accurate, complete, coherent and consistent. Ideally, it should also come from one source, in a standardized format. This is the only way to ensure maximum output from your software.

If your data comes from a range of different sources, or with multiple templates that don’t align, your bots won’t process the content effectively. This type of data would be considered to be unclean and of poor quality. When dealing with data like this, manual intervention may be required in order for the software to complete its required tasks, which can put pressure back on resources.

To get the most out of automation, ensure you feed your bots good, clean data. This can be done with the process of data cleansing, and also with pre-robotics solutions.  Systemizing your data and content is a crucial step when preparing for RPA rollout. This will ensure that you create a responsive environment, one that is ready for a digital workforce and one that will be easy to scale.

The importance of data cleansing

Data cleaning involves detecting corrupt data and updating records with accurate information. This is something that all businesses should invest time and effort into, as it keeps your information relevant and up-to-date.

The main areas you will need to look at are:

Data duplication

High quality data needs to have uniqueness. All duplicate files should be removed and any related data should be truncated with one access point.

Data errors

Get rid of incorrect or corrupted data, and rectify things such as spelling mistakes or incorrect number files.

Data analysis

Consider whether the data you have is useful or relevant. A lot of companies carry old data that provides no value. This would be a good time to spring clean unnecessary content.

Data standardization

This is where pre-robotics solutions can be especially helpful, in organizing information from multiple sources into a consistent template that bots can understand.

Using a pre-robotics solution

Data standardization is one of the most critical areas of the data cleansing process. One that can be the difference between RPA efficiency and RPA failure. Manually, this would cost companies a great deal of time and money, and there are no assurances against repeat human errors. Rather than attempting a manual overhaul of your databases, deploy an automated solution instead.

Pre-robotics solutions offer an efficient and agile way of managing unstructured information, working with just about any type of data that enters into your business. They work by mining information through a set of clearly defined business rules, and the process is fully computerized for minimal human effort.

Some of the key benefits of a pre-robotics solution include:

• Able to process, collate and extract different types of content
• Multi-channel capabilities (post, email, attachments, RSS feeds, etc.)
• Results in standardized content formats that are consistent and easy for bots to understand

Maximize output with RPA software

By providing your RPA software with accurate and well-formatted data, you can make your digital workforce work harder. This allows you to harness robotics for touchless processes from end to end. Fully digital processes can then be monitored, adjusted and optimized as needed.

To be completely robotics ready, not only do you need clean data, but you will also need to ensure that your processes have been streamlined too. This is important because RPA mimics the keystrokes of human workers. Unless you improve your manual sequence from start to finish, inefficiencies or mistakes will be carried over into the RPA system. Correct mapping is essential for success.

Only once you have cleaned your data, fully optimized and accurately mapped your processes, can you reap the rewards of what RPA has to offer.

Further reading:

• The State of Robotic Process Automation
• Smart Ways to use Robotics by AuraQ
• How Robotic Process Automation Can Protect Financial Services