RPA in the Real World

To get a better sense of how RPA works and to understand the benefits, here’s a look at a case study of Microsoft.¹² Every year, the company pays billions of dollars in royalties to game developers, partners, and content creators. Yet the process was mostly manual, involving the sending of thousands of statements—and yes, this was a big time waster for the company.

So the company selected Kyron for an RPA implementation. By doing an initial process review, Microsoft realized that anywhere from 70% to 80% of the statements were straightforward and could be easily automated. The rest included exceptions that required human intervention, such as approvals.

With the RPA system, a visual detection algorithm could divvy up the statements and find the exceptions. The setup was also fairly quick, taking about 6 weeks.

As should be no surprise, the results had a material impact on the process. For instance, a bot was able to take only 2.5 hours to complete 150 royalty statements. By comparison, it would take 50 hours for employees to do this. The bottom line: Microsoft achieved a 2,000% savings. There was also an elimination of any rework from human error (which before was about 5% in a given month).