RPA Automation Anywhere: Top 8 Real-Life Applications of Online Bots

Don’t work hard, work smart! In today’s business climate, it’s all about cutting costs, increasing productivity, and staying competitive in the marketplace. To achieve these, you must automate routine tasks and use RPA tools. If you don’t, your competitors will leave you in the dust.

And you don’t want that!

Don’t think that RPA applications are only for BIG companies. They’re applicable for any company, regardless of its size. In short, if there’s anything at all in your business that’s performed routinely, you can automate it and reap the benefits of RPA.

Read on and find out:

• what the RPA acronym stands for
• the benefits of using RPA bots in your business
• real-life RPA use cases

Introduction to RPA

What does the RPA acronym stand for?

The RPA abbreviation stands for Robotic Process Automation. It’s an emerging new technology that aims to automate everyday rules-based business tasks. By applying RPA best practices, a business can free up time and devote it to other high-value tasks such as improving customer support, studying the marketplace, scaling the business, and so on.

Even though it’s considered ‘emerging’, adaptation is proving fast with RPA growth expected at over 13 billion US dollars by 2030.

The three main benefits of automating business routine tasks are the following:

1. Increased Efficiency

For example, RPA can help in improving the monitoring of network devices and increase business efficiency. How? By establishing the parameters (rules) of when a specific network device should be operational or not, an RPA bot can measure throughput and automatically compute whether the network device is adequate or insufficient for its task.

Consider if a human had to constantly monitor your business network devices and repetitively evaluate their performance. It isn't very efficient, is it?

Spoiler alert: it is not!

2. Increased Productivity

Imagine the cost- and time savings for your business. Human productivity is limited because one can only dedicate a set number of hours per day. However, with RPA capabilities, a routine task can be performed 24/7/365. No sick leaves, vacation days, or coffee breaks.

Because robots don’t care.

3. Improved Analytics

With RPA applications, your business can gather data faster and more accurately. This, in turn, provides improved analytics for your business, enabling you to make faster and smarter business decisions.

For instance, you can gather product sales patterns over specific periods (e.g., hourly, weekly, seasonally, yearly, etc.) and based on that, you can decide to scale production for a specific product only for that specific period. This directly contributes to your market competitiveness – get the data fast, analyze it quickly, and react even faster.

Top 8 Real-Life RPA Use Cases

Below you will find a list of industries where RPA tools can be applied.

1. RPA in Advertising

Is online advertising part of your marketing efforts? Here are RPA advertising use cases.

• Automate keyword research and easily know which keywords or key phrases potential customers are using online with the help of the Search Volume and CPC Finder by Botster. This RPA bot displays Google Keyword Planner's search volume and cost-per-click (CPC) for a list of keywords. It can be used as an effective RPA automation tool for sales lead generation. Watch a quick video tutorial on how to use the Search Volume and CPC Finder:

• Simplify ad research and find out what ads competitors are running using the Google Ads Extractor. This RPA bot extracts LIVE, paid advertisements from the first page of Google search for a list of keywords based on a specific location.
• Speed up product development and market research if you plan to run a marketing campaign on Amazon using the Amazon Search Extractor by Botster. This RPA bot extracts a list of products from Amazon based on search keywords that you provide and then scrapes relevant product and market data about them from the Amazon catalog. This may be especially useful when you are choosing what to sell on Amazon to make money. Watch our easy-to-follow video tutorial on how to use this bot:

2. Lead Generation and Prospecting Services

Imagine manually scouting through hundreds of websites and collecting phones and email addresses of potential leads by hand, instead of automating it. What a waste of human hours! This is probably the first thing every marketing agency attempts to automate.

• Find and extract phones and website addresses of your potential leads using keywords by scraping contact data right from Google Maps with our Google Maps Scraper bot.
• Check competitor info using the Company Data Finder by Boster. This RPA bot retrieves public data about a company based on a variety of open sources via its website URL.
• Extract email addresses and phone numbers from a list of websites and find business partners online with our Phone and Email scraping bot:

Wow, you just saved yourself a few hours of Internet research. Probably more than that!

3. RPA in Administration

Here are a few RPA administrator use cases:

• Automate course scheduling and speed up participant data entry using a training-oriented RPA bot.
• Automate simple payroll processing activities (e.g., batch validation, employee-department checking, etc.) using a salary-focused RPA tool.
• Automate product deliveries to customers using delivery-process-oriented RPA software.
• Improve customer relations by using the Social Network Accounts Finder by Botster. This RPA bot uses Google search and extracts links to selected social networks for a list of company names or people that you provide:

4. RPA in Auditing

Here are a few RPA audit use cases:

• Automatically download Financial Statement Data Sets from the SEC.
• Another RPA in audit benefit is to automatically consolidate various auditing data from different sources (e.g., Excel, Google Sheets, CaseWare, etc.) into ONE audit work paper.
• Automatically preparing invoices and sending them electronically is another benefit of applying RPA in auditing.

Tip: Do you have a specific auditing task you want automated? Get in touch for a Custom Bot from Botster!

5. RPA in HR

Here are some RPA for Human Resources use cases:

• Find candidates for a vacant position using the Linkedin Profile Scraper by Boster. This RPA human resources bot enables you to extract personal CV data from a person’s PUBLIC LinkedIn profile page.
• Research competitors’ job openings using our Linkedin Job Scraper. This human resources RPA bot enables you to extract information about a particular company’s job openings as published on LinkedIn.
• Check if your applicants’ emails are valid before contacting them using the Email Validator by Botster. This RPA for HR bot will check if certain email addresses are legit.
• Automatically separate messages received for various Job Openings using our Email to Messengers Forwarder. This RPA human resources department bot creates a dedicated email address (e.g. NovemberJobOpenings@parse.botster.io) to which you can send content. From here, the message will be forwarded to your company HR Slack channel or HR Telegram messenger account (read my guide on how to forward Gmail to Telegram):

6. RPA for Airlines

Here are a few RPA airline use cases:

• Automate the printing of cargo labels using aircraft package-oriented RPA airlines bots.
• Manage aircraft shipments end-to-end better (from fulfillment centers to end-goal delivery locations) using logistics-related RPA aircraft bots.
• Automate the digitization of legacy files and documents using document retrieval and digitization-oriented RPA tools.

7. RPA for Monitoring

• Monitor ISP uptime services using the Uptime Monitoring Bot by Botster. This RPA bot monitors a URL's availability and sends a downtime alert whenever a URL responds with anything other than a 200 (OK) status code. Notifications can be received via your email, Slack, or Telegram account.
• Monitor telecom Twitter accounts so you’re updated about telecom service outages using the Twitter Tweets Extractor or Twitter Hashtag Scraper by Botster. These RPA bots will immediately let you know if your telecom provider (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, etc.) is down. This can prove extremely important if you have an online business or if your business relies on real-time online data.

8. RPA in Software Testing

Following are applicable uses of RPA in software testing:

• Automatically test a website by loading a list of URLs using the Response Code Bulk Checker by Botster. This RPA bot helps test websites that are generated using a content management system (e.g., CMS like WordPress) or other types of database-driven content.
• Automate the gathering of data and/or samples to be used in software testing.
• Automate the process of testing software upgrades before they’re released or deployed to the public.

RPA Use Case Conclusion

As you can see from the RPA robotic process automation examples above, RPA applies to almost any routine task imaginable. Botster already has a library of RPAs you can use immediately, from simple bulk email extraction to advanced market product research.

There’s no need for you to ‘know code’, just as what the RPA use case examples indicate above, Botster RPA tools are plug-and-play so you can immediately use them for your business processes and benefit from the automation.

'Why RPA' and Other FAQs

How does RPA work?

RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is the use of ‘software robots’ or simply bots to automate repetitive tasks in any business. Examples of common repetitive tasks include data entry, attendance monitoring, inventory monitoring, logistic monitoring, and so on.

How to learn RPA?

If you want to learn to create RPA bots then you need to study software programming. If you are already a software engineer, you can go further and get an RPA certification. However, as a business owner or manager, you don’t need to learn how to make an RPA tool at all. You can apply ready-made RPA bots, or have one custom-made for you. (Click here to post your project and ask for a Custom Bot from Botster.)