How MuleSoft RPA Helps Businesses Save Money and Scale

As a design-led consultancy, Studio Science is on a mission to create better experiences for our clients, and to help you, in turn, deliver better experiences for your employees and customers alike. With that in mind, what would you say if I told you there’s a solution to the repetitive manual tasks that take up valuable employee time, yet still need to get done?

What is MuleSoft RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA), valued at more than $2 billion as of 2020, is one of the fastest growing software categories for a reason. And it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

As the name suggests, RPA functions like a (ro)bot that can be programmed to perform repetitive click-based tasks your employees would typically do with a mouse and keyboard. Essentially, it works with a legacy application as a source of truth and automates the human element of tasks like data entry, and lets the computer handle the clicks and keystrokes.

Prior to Studio Science, I cut my teeth working with an RPA tool for a previous employer who was completing an integration for 1-800 Medicare. Last year, when MuleSoft, a product of Salesforce, announced the release of their own RPA tool, I was sent to not just learn about the product, but to also write the Salesforce Certification exam that other developers would need to take in order to become certified in MuleSoft RPA.

Suffice to say, I know my way around the platform. In my current role at Studio Science as Manager of MuleSoft, I spend my days helping our clients automate their tasks through RPA. From PDFs, spreadsheets, static websites, and legacy desktop applications that were last updated for Y2K (no joke) – if you can get to it from a Windows machine, MuleSoft RPA can utilize it. Combined with an integration tool like Composer or Anypoint Platform, RPA can be used to turn these “swivel-chair integrations” into invokable APIs, letting you tie these previously standalone data sources or applications into a larger integration strategy.

How it Helps Your Business

By leveraging MuleSoft RPA, your business can reap a multitude of benefits, including:

• Savings: As I noted above, MuleSoft RPA can all but eliminate the repetitive tasks (that don’t require critical thought or problem solving capabilities) currently being performed by a human. This can be payroll, invoice processing, data scraping, and any other form of data processing you can imagine. With this freed up time, your employees can focus on more important things like helping customers and problem solving, leading to increased productivity. Additionally, according to the 1-10-100 rule of escalation, it costs $1 to prevent a data entry issue, $10 to correct an issue, and $100 if a data accuracy failure occurs. Given MuleSoft RPA enables companies to prevent human-caused errors, it helps save money due to correction or failure.
• Accuracy: While human intellect, critical thought, and ingenuity will never be able to be fully replaced by technology, we are also imperfect beings and mistakes can be made. This is where technology can be complementary to human capacity. MuleSoft RPA helps reduce errors in data entry and can perform tasks with 100% consistency and accuracy every time (if the script was initially generated correctly).
• Modernization: Many of our clients at Studio Science are still using legacy technology, which has traditionally been difficult to integrate with more modern solutions. In turn, employees spend precious time entering data into multiple locations because these systems are unable to communicate to each other. MuleSoft RPA can interact with systems the same way a human would read text from the screen, fill out forms, and click through applications, providing a way for organizations to input and export data from these legacy systems.
• Scalability: As more businesses go digital and customer demands and competition increases, the need for software like MuleSoft RPA to help a business scale is necessary. Like APIs, RPA can be reused for multiple projects so if you’re using it to scrape data from one application into another, you can also use the same script to pull from another application. RPA also eliminates the need for organizations to hire and train a larger workforce, which allows for it to scale quicker.

As you might imagine, MuleSoft RPA can be implemented and utilized across a multitude of industries. For instance, Studio Science recently worked with Adobe Care and Wellness, where we implemented MuleSoft RPA to reduce the amount of data entry nurses had to perform so they could focus on their patients. We’re also currently working with an insurance brokerage using an Excel spreadsheet that’s 100+ columns of data. Typically it takes one of their employees 20 builds a week, at 20-30 per minutes per build, to insert the data. We’re automating this process with a combination of  Anypoint Platform and MuleSoft RPA to handle the data entry, freeing up to 10 hours per week for the employee to perform more knowledge-based tasks.

With all of that said, humans and technology are meant to work in unison and complement each other. At Studio Science, we take a human-centered design approach to every project we work on, thinking holistically about the full, connected customer and employee experience. Then, we leverage and implement technology like MuleSoft RPA for our clients in order to create the best total experience. One without the other simply wouldn’t cut it.

How to get started

To get started with MuleSoft RPA, first identify processes that are good candidates for automation – think of anything that’s repeatable, stable, and rule driven. Once you have this put together, you can work with a service implementer like Studio Science, who has been at the forefront of MuleSoft RPA since its launch, to help you lay out the RPA process flow.

If you’re interested in learning more about MuleSoft RPA and how it can benefit your business, please reach out to me directly at hardy.spry@studioscience.com.