Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Recent progress in digitization has had significant impact on white-collar work as well as on products and their related technology. It has been said that in the next 10 to 20 years, 47% of jobs will be substituted by automated or robot labor. RPA is a particular type of digitization, and its implementation is absolutely essential to raising a company’s added value in the future. At KPMG, we assist corporate problem-solving through our support for RPA implementation, making use of our prodigious industry knowledge of business innovation and RPA implementation cases in both Japan and abroad.

 

Major Impact of RPA implementation

• Contribution to Quality Improvement
  RPA enjoys high affinity with clerical task processing in general, and compared to human labor, is more capable of carrying out tasks both continuously and reliably. Consequently, errors and clerical mistakes are greatly reduced, leading to improved task quality.

• Contribution to Speed
  Data editing, screen operation, and other tasks via RPA do not involve physical manipulation of devices such as keyboard and mouse, and therefore a task can be accomplished at tens and hundreds of times the speed of human labor, resulting in overwhelming increase in speed of operation. In addition, the speed of implementation and response to changes, and overall speed in producing results, will also improve.

• Contribution to Efficiency Improvement
  RPA renders human intervention superfluous; work can be carried out in parallel with virtually no resource constraints. The result is that while cost-reduction achieved through business process outsourcing (BPO) and other measures based on labor cost differentials and standardization is thought to top out at 15-30 %, RPA enables cost reduction of 40-70 %.*
  * According to results for Company A in their final report.

KPMG Standardized Approach

• RPA implementation has the potential to change the way processes and business are done. Greater effectiveness can be unleashed by incorporating business process reform into the perspective rather than simply viewing the matter as RPA tool implementation.

• KPMG’s RPA development and quality standards distill best practices nurtured through a wealth of productive experience to successfully build efficient and high-quality RPA that leverages the characteristics of RPA tools.

Advantages of KPMG

• Our Global Network
  At KPMG, we use our global network, a wealth of experience with cross-border projects and our knowledge of trailblazing cases on a global level to provide advisory services, such as RPA diagnosis (status analysis & support in identifying RPA target scope), support in defining visions for the future, solution selection support, RPA implementation support, and process reform support.

• Developing and Utilizing Personnel
  All predictable work is possibly replaced with RPA, but on the other hand, there is concern that Japan will suffer from serious labor shortage in the future. One of the keys is to give renewed thought to areas where personnel currently on hand can be utilized, and what to do about education towards that end.

• Policy & Governance in Shifting to RPA
  RPA is capable of doing anything that can realistically be digitized, but applying RPA to everything increases the number of non-optimized processes, retreading the spaghetti codes from computing’s past and rendering correction difficult. For that reason, policy and governance must be set in place determining what work is to be automated via RPA and what is to be systematized.