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The adoption of robotic automation in the life sciences industry increases productivity, reduce operational costs, and allow collaboration.

Fremont, CA: The emerging digital workforce is well suited for numerous routine administrative and production tasks that do not depend on human judgment and are usually rule-based and repetitive. Automating these procedures will improve efficiency, reduce operational costs, and collaborate throughout the biopharma value chain. The automation of the “robotic” nature of tasks will allow the employees to focus on activities that drive the value, enhance customer engagement, and in-turn revenue. Therefore, robotic process automation (RPA) transforms the efficiency equation and directly improves the customer experience. This complimenting technology can help the companies organize themselves for the future, laying the foundation for an autonomous enterprise driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

With the increasing pressure to provide operational efficiencies, CROs, pharma, and biotech leaders are seeking RPA as a way to integrate numerous sources of massive volumes of data for evaluation and insight. This dovetails with current additional quality, clinical, compliance, and regulatory tools offered by MasterControl.

Here are some of the RPA technology applications in the primary industry processes throughout the life sciences value chain.

Commercial operations: RPA can be applied to functions like sales force effectiveness, marketing fulfillment, aggregate spend reporting, chargeback, and rebate processing accounts payable. 

Most firms get their data from a third-party provider, but the data quality is not the best available. RPA can enrich the collected data and lessen the process of third-party aggregation. It can also profit sub-processes of supply chain management such as procure to pay, reconciliation of invoices, purchase orders, and so on.

Clinical development: Data management; automation of the integrated manual, repetitive process, changes data from text, PDF to use format for data analysis.

Regulatory submissions: During the regulatory submission process, a lot of time and effort is invested in quality verification. RPA can utilize optical character recognition (OCR) and related technologies to automate the process.

To conclude, robotics can enhance a life science manufacturer’s future agility. The technology will be impacted in all of the industry’s organizations in the next few years. To best understand the opportunities inherent in RPA adoption, companies must start to assess which low-complexity tasks are best suited for the technology. The good news is that the CROs, pharma, and device makers can take advantage of emerging leading practices learned in other industries. The keys to successfully profiting from RPA technology begins with setting reasonable expectations at the start. The next step is to promote frequent conversations between RPA consultants, developers, and business users to educate and offer training that facilitates the trust needed to achieve robotics’ full potential in the life sciences space.

See also: Top Robotic Process Automation Consulting/Services Companies