Finding staff for back-office and administrative work has become increasingly difficult, and some of these repetitive tasks can now be handled by software robots. According to Rakó Ágnes, head of the KPMG Smart Digital Finance team, simple rule-based jobs — such as gathering advertising offers, preparing price quotes or compiling reports — are suitable for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which can relieve human resources.
Which tasks suit RPA?
RPA is effective for repetitive office processes that can be defined with clear rules. For example, when a new order arrives a colleague normally opens the customer relationship management system and collects the client’s data and order history — a software robot can perform that exact sequence. The solution is process-focused rather than tied to a single system, so it can handle any easily definable, repetitive task.
Rakó Ágnes points out that in back-office areas the labour shortage often means there simply is no one to do the work, and people are less willing to perform repetitive tasks. Multinational companies increasingly expect subsidiaries to automate processes, and RPA is among the quickest and lowest-cost solutions to deploy.
Organizational risks and coordination
It is common for business units to start automation projects independently. While such initiatives rarely make others’ work harder in practice, isolated projects can produce only limited impact. Better results are achieved when process development is considered across the entire company, with standardized, transparent and modular operations. Often the first step is simplifying existing processes, which alone can reduce human workload. When implementing RPA, precise process documentation that the software can interpret is essential and this requirement often drives more efficient operations.
Examples from media and advertising
In media and advertising, agencies may collect dozens of media vendors’ offers from various sites, PDFs or emails. Manually consolidating these on a daily or weekly basis is time-consuming; RPA can perform the collection quickly and without errors. Likewise, assembling unified analyses from multiple reporting sources (e.g., Facebook, Google and other reports) can be automated to accelerate the workflow.
Reducing GDPR-related workload
GDPR compliance can create many manual tasks, such as locating or deleting a person’s data across several databases on request. Rakó says they have implemented RPA solutions specifically for data deletion during system migrations. Robots are well suited for maintaining, updating and continuously checking customer databases and typically deliver better data quality by eliminating human inattentive errors.
RPA vs. VBA macros and custom software
Although many offices use VBA macros, RPA has the advantage of interacting with any program: it emulates mouse and keyboard actions on a virtual screen and can switch between applications, transfer and compare data. Robots run on background servers, so they are not tied to a workstation or a particular employee, and their operation can be handed over to other staff. Macros, by contrast, are often bespoke creations of a single person and may be hard for others to interpret.
RPA is usually faster and cheaper than bespoke IT development. Building and deploying a custom application can take months and requires advanced IT skills, while RPA can often be configured by business users with minimal IT knowledge. However, RPA is not a cognitive AI solution: it executes predefined rule-based sequences. If an input website or system changes, the robot must be adjusted accordingly.
Deployment, maintenance and internal training
A well-structured RPA environment typically does not require ongoing external developer support. During deployment, key users are trained not only to operate the system but also to make necessary modifications. Colleagues with the right affinity can quickly learn the operational tasks, which means robots do not take away work but free people to focus on higher-value activities.
Conclusion
Against the backdrop of labour shortages and growing administrative loads, RPA offers a rapid, cost-effective way to automate rule-based repetitive tasks, including GDPR-related operations. Organizations achieve the best results when automation is planned at company level and accompanied by process simplification and standardization.
