RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

RPA is a technology ruled by business logic and structured inputs to automate business processes. It is a type of software that lets you transact in any IT application or website like a human would, to execute rule-based work.

Processing any transaction, data management, response triggers, and communication to other systems can be interpreted by configuring software or a robot with artificial intelligence (AI). It is like starting from something as simple as generating an automatic response to an email to stationing bots, and each is programmed to automate the task in a system.

The goal of RPA is to convey the execution of the process from humans to bots. Robotic automation communicates with the existing IT structure with no complicated system integration needed. It can also use to automate a workflow or any other business processes that are employment-intensive. These bots can communicate with your internal application, website, user portal, and the likes.

The ultimate goal of RPA is to replace repetitive and tiresome administrative tasks done by humans, with a virtual workforce.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Why have an RPA?

1. The business climate is constantly changing. Any business needs to consistently develop its product, sales, marketing, etc. process to grow and stay fit.
2. Most businesses use a lot of IT systems to run their operations. With the change in the Business process, these systems are not frequently changing due to cost, time, and implementation difficulty challenges. Therefore, the current process does not communicate with the technical process outlined in the IT system.
3. For them to defeat technical and business liability, manpower utilizes to fill the gap between operations and processes.

Any change in the process requires a company to hire new employees or train existing employees to map IT systems and business processes. Any of these solutions utilize a lot of time and money. With any following changes in the process will need hiring or re-training.

With RPA, you can station virtual workers who work like humans. If a change in process is needed, it is always quicker and more affordable than retraining numbers of employees.

Having an RPA has an advantage.

1. Humans work an average of 8 hours a day while robots work 24hours without getting tired.
2. 60% average productivity of a man with few errors, unlike Robots, which has 100% productivity without mistakes.
3. Humans can multitask, but robots handle multiple tasks very well.

What are the benefits?

RPA gives businesses the ability to reduce staffing costs and human error.

Bots are generally low-cost and easy to execute, it does not require custom software or extensive systems integration.

Businesses can pressurize their automation efforts by including RPA with intelligent technologies such as machine learning, voice recognition, and programming language processing, and automation of more complex tasks that use to require intuitive and analysis skills of humans.

It says that this year 2020, automation and artificial intelligence will decrease employee demands in business by 65%, which means the RPA market will top $1 billion by 2020. That says, 40% of big companies will adopt an RPA software tool.

Points for efficient RPA

Set and manage expectations.  Early results are achievable with RPA, but driving RPA to run at measure is different. Many RPA challenges start with poor expectations management. That’s why CIOs must go in with a carefully positive mindset.

Weigh the business impact. RPA is often encouraged to sustain ROI or lessen costs when it should use to improve customer experience.

Associate IT ahead and regularly. This ensures the organization gets the resources they require and not when it is too late, and problems arise.

Poor planning and management. Many executions fail due to plans and changes that are poorly managing. Rushing to deploy something, some miscommunicate between several bots, which can crush a business process. Before the operation, there should be proper planning. Detail how several bots should work together.

Project administration is of greatest importance. Another challenge in RPA is failing to plan for inevitable barriers. CIOs (Chief Information Officer) must continually check for bottlenecks where their RPA solution can monitor and alert the system to watch for issues impacting performance.

Control maintains compliance. There are several administration challenges linked to incorporating a single bot in the process. When determining bot’s gender, a valid question must take into account HR, ethics, and other fields of compliance for the business.

Create an RPA pool of expertise. The most thriving RPA implementations include people responsible for the success of an efficient program. The RPA pool of expertise improves business circumstances, calculating possible cost optimization and ROI, and measures growth against those goals.

Impact on people. Amazed by new solutions, some businesses are so focused on implementation that they missed involving HR, which can produce challenging scenarios for employees who find their daily processes and workflows disordered. People First.

RPA Implementation Methodology

Planning

In this stage, Identify processes that you want to automate. The following will help you know the right process

1. Is your process manual & repetitive?
2. Your process based on rules?
3. Is your input data in electronic format and readable?
4. Can the existing system be used as it is with no change?

Next, steps in the planning stage are

1. Organize a project team, settle implementation timelines, and strategy.
2. Follow solution design for implementing RPA processes.
3. Classify the logging tool that should implement to see problems with running bots.
4. A clear process should be defined to surmount RPA implementation

Development

In this stage, you begin improving the automation workflows as per the agreed plan.

Testing

In this stage, you drive Testing cycles for in-scope automation to classify and correct errors.

Support & Maintenance

Administer constant support after going live and help in urgent bug resolution. Obey general maintenance instructions with duties and engagements.

RDA streamlines Supply Chain Operations:

• It eliminates human errors, has improved compliance and the staff has greater satisfaction
• The AHT (Average Handling Time) is reduced by 40%
• An 80% reduction in processing costs
• Advance implementation of the new process
• An increase in the size of the robotic workforce and staff will focus on customer service
• 24/7 monitoring
• ROI in up to 3 months
• Process elements can be re-use

Uses of RPA

1. Imitates Human Action:

Mimics human performance of the repeated process using multiple applications and operations.

2. Administer high-volume repeated duties:

RPA can efficiently reproduce the re-encoding of data from one system to another. It executes tasks like data entry, copying, and pasting.

3. Execute Multiple Tasks:

Performs multiple and complicated duties across various systems. This assists in processing transactions, managing data, and sending reports.

4. ‘Virtual’ system integration:

This system can transfer data between different and legacy systems by connecting them at the user interface level rather than developing new data support.

5. Automated report production:

Automates the extraction of data to produce concrete, useful and up-to-date reports.

6. Data validation and auditing:

Resolves and double-checks information between various systems to confirm and check data to provide compliance and auditing outputs.

7. Technical debt control:

Helps to lessen technical debt by decreasing the gap between systems, stopping the institution of practiced implementations.

8. Product administration:

It helps to connect the gap between IT systems and associated product administration programs by automatically updating both systems.

9. Quality Assurance:

It can be useful to QA processes that cover relapse testing and automating customer use case situations.

10. Data migration:

It allows automated data migration through systems that are not possible using traditional means, like document, spreadsheets, or other source data files.

11. Gap solutions:

RPA automatically mends the gaps with process insufficiencies. It involves many simple tasks like password resets, the system resets, etc.

12. Income forecasting:

Automatically updates financial statements to calculate income forecasting.

Benefits:

1. A vast amount of processes can easily automate.
2. Significantly decreased costs as it takes care of the repetitive task and conserves valuable time and resources.
3. Programming abilities are not needed to arrange a software robot. Hence, any non-technical crew can set up a bot or take note of the steps to automate the process.
4. RPA supports and enables all usual compliance processes, auditing without error.
5. It can rapidly shape and deploy the automation method.
6. The bugs are tracked for each test case.
7. Efficient, smooth Release Management.
8. Real-time visibility to bug/error detection.
9. There is no human need, which means there is no need for required training.
10. Robots do not get tired. It progresses, which helps to increase flexibility.

Disadvantages:

1. The bot is restricted to the speed of the application
2. Even small changes made in the software process will need robots reconfiguration.

EDI – Electronic Data Interchange