Compliance and RPA: Are They the Perfect Match?

Compliance is a big issue for many companies, especially with the coming of the GDPR, SOX compliance, HIPAA, and more. Whether a company handles sensitive data or needs to meet strict regulations, maintaining compliance is a company-wide effort.

People often ask me whether robotic process automation (RPA) is a compliance-friendly solution. Perhaps they watched too many movies where robots become sentient and overthrow their human masters.

The simple answer is that RPA is one of the most compliance-friendly automation solutions on the market.

RPA: The Compliance Dream

What makes RPA a compliance dream? Robots are programmed to perform specific tasks and nothing else.

Yes, we may one day see the rise of self-taught AI that can teach other AI, but that technology is many years away.

RPA solutions simply don’t go rogue. Their programming doesn’t support these kinds of actions. Instead, they focus on specific tasks. Bots will not share passwords—they won’t send emails in error or download potentially dangerous files. With the majority of bots the data is encrypted at rest as well as in flight so the bot never actually has access to the data they are interacting with.

The reality is that a company’s employees are far more likely to make compliance mistakes. This is why bots are far better to have in your IT infrastructure. Companies looking to build compliance systems should see bots as both a form of efficiency and security.

What Compliance Advantages Does RPA Offer?

A company’s ability to maintain compliance is important for a variety of reasons. While legal fines are unfavorable, a complete erosion of customer trust is even more dangerous for a company.

According to Deloitte, “several aspects of compliance oversight operations can be enhanced through RPA implementation.”

But what advantages does RPA provide beyond eliminating simple human error? Based on my experience, here are a few of the main ones:

Minimize legal mistakes. RPA solutions can reduce your legal burden by ensuring that important legal compliance is handled according to protocol. This can reduce your risk of violating regulations by eliminating human error from the equation.
Build efficient internal systems. Knowing how a process is executed from start to finish can simplify the compliance issue. The predictability that RPA provides can improve your overall business operations.
Maintain customer trust. Today’s customers care about their data more than ever. Large data breaches can damage your reputation beyond repair, losing customers in the process. Implementing RPA ensures that the systems you rely on to maintain compliance are consistent and reliable.
Better oversight and auditing. Audits are a normal part of business for most companies. Everything an RPA solution does is traceable through logs. That means every input and output can be assessed by humans. This enhanced level of oversight gives companies a lot of control over how they approach compliance, how to identify potential problems and solve them.
Develop high-level compliance systems. Humans are susceptible to variation in the work they perform. With an RPA solution, once a process is created, every iteration of that process will be the same. This allows you to create high-level compliance systems built around your automated workflow.
Infinitely scalable. The more humans you rely on to complete a task, the more likely you will encounter some kind of error. RPA doesn’t suffer from this problem. Automated solutions are infinitely scalable, and will produce the same quality of work regardless of how many automated solutions your company has implemented.
Deployable in most industries. Compliance impacts nearly every industry in the business world. Training humans to understand the nuances of an industry, the specific regulations, and the data a company is handling is time-consuming. RPA can learn that same information far quicker, making it easy for companies to deploy bots across a variety of departments.

RPA Isn’t a Compliance Problem—It’s the Solution

Competitive companies are already embracing RPA for the many advantages it has to offer. It’s clear automation will play a major role in the coming decades as companies look to improve their efficiency and build scalable systems that are aligned for growth.

While compliance is an important topic that companies should think about, RPA shouldn’t be seen as a problem. If anything, it’s the ideal solution to a problem that’s plagued companies for decades.

Where else can you find a repeatable solution that generates the same quality of results every time? From a compliance standpoint, bots are the way to go. As AI and machine learning continue to evolve, their capabilities will only grow.

Companies looking to improve their ability to maintain compliance, as well as their business operations, should see RPA as a logical solution.

Are you interested in learning more about RPA and how it can help your company stay compliant in the digital age? Get in touch with Tangentia, the leader in RPA solutions with local offices in Canada, America and India.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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