Robotic process automation

Robotic process automation - RPA

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation. RPA is a technology that allows professionals to configure their computer software or the ‘robot’ to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to execute business processes. Robots in RPA utilize the UI to capture user data and manipulate applications just like humans. RPA interprets and triggers responses and interacts with other systems to perform multiple tasks. The only difference between human and RPA software is that an RPA software never sleeps and makes no mistakes.

How is RPA different from other enterprise automation tools?

As compared to traditional IT solutions, RPA enables enterprises to automate at a very little cost and time. RPA is a non-destructive process and uses the existing infrastructure without any damage to the underlying systems, as this would be costly to replace. RPA is appealing to enterprises because it is cost-efficient and its compliance is not an operating cost, but a byproduct of the automation.

How does Robotic Process Automation work?

Robots of the RPA mimic a majority of human actions, like logging into applications, move files and folders, move data, fill forms, scrape browsers, etc.

One must look for these three capabilities in an RPA system:

• Interacting with other systems by either screen scrapping or API integration.
• Decision-Making capabilities
• Interface for bot programming

Another advantage that RPA offers is that you need not have programming skills to use RPA tools. Industries can use the readily available RPA tools for their system automation.

Types of Robotic Process Automation

With the technology being used so widely, we must understand the types of robotic automation that enterprises can leverage.

1. Attended automation: These tools require human intervention during the automation processes.
2. Unattended automation: These are intelligent tools with decision-making capabilities.
3. Hybrid RPA: Hybrid RPA has combined capabilities of both attended and unattended automation tools.

Where is RPA employed?

With RPA, automation anywhere, automation everywhere is the new lingo. RPA is mainly employed in Banking, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Telecommunication industries.

Most popular Tools for Robotic Process Automation

Organizations these days have a lot of tasks at hand and some of them are cumbersome and repetitive. There is always a possibility of errors while doing such tasks. So to avoid errors, there are many RPA tools and software in the market.

The tools are efficient to automate the daily tasks that the employees perform manually on the software. Listed are 5 most popular RPA tools:

a. Blue Prism RPA

This tool provides all core capabilities. It can function on any platform with any application. This tool requires some coding skills but is user friendly for developers. It can be used at medium to large enterprises. Features include:

• Supports the multi-environment deployment model.
• Provides security for network and software credentials
• Versatile for any platform
• Versatile for any application
• It is independent of platforms
• Works at a high speed.

b. Inflectra Rapise

Rapise is an on-scenario solution used for hybrid business scenarios. It can automate Web, Desktop, and Mobile applications. Both programmers and non-developers can use the tool easily.

This tool is perfect for small to medium organizations. Features include:

• Can support any project size for automation
• Has a record and play functionality
• Web & desktop automation; Web and screen scraping
• REST and SOAP calls and email processing (Gmail, Office 365, private mail servers)
• Provides an open platform for enhancements and integration
• Friendly for non-developers too
• Offers fast execution
• Has training and certificates

c. UiPath

UiPath offers all core capabilities. There is support for Citrix, is user-friendly for non-developers and can handle complex processes. This tool is perfect for any size of business. Features include:

• Manages credentials, provides encryption and access controls based on the role.
• Can automate faster. Eight to ten times faster automation through Citrix too.
• Offers an open platform.
• It can handle any process, in any number, irrespective of its complexity.
• Does not require programming skills.
• Easy to use drag and drop functionality
• Great features, free of cost

d. Automation anywhere

Automation Anywhere provides all core capabilities that enterprises aspire for. For instance, On-premise and cloud services. It is user-friendly and is perfect for medium and large organizations. Features include:

• Security for banking systems
• authentication, encryption, and credentials security.
• Generating real-time reports and analytics
• Provides platform independence.
• It is user friendly

e. Pega

Pega is also a Business Process Management tool that can be used on desktop servers. It provides only cloud-based solutions or services and can work on Windows, Linux, and Mac. This tool is perfect for medium and large businesses. Features include:

• Deployment of your solutions to the customers.
• Providing cloud-based solution
  No storage of execution data in the database, rather storage in memory Faster execution because of event-driven approach
  Robust and reliable

Quora questions:

1. What is RPA technology? Explain with a real-life example.

Instead of writing definitions from the internet, let us understand RPA through an example.

If a guy is working on data collection activity, his daily task is to get data from different people through email and collate everything in a Spreadsheet. Then make some calculations with the data and upload it to some website. This is supposed to be his routine work. This work can be automated through RPA, which is nothing but a software robot that mimics human work. Now, what will this robot do?

It will Read eMails and collect data.

Save the date in Spreadsheet

Do some transactions or changes with that data.

And finally, it will upload the same into another website.

This is a simple automation of the repetitive task that the human had to do, hence called Robotic Process Automation.

2. What is the scope of RPA after 5 years? Is it worth moving on to RPA at this time?

RPA is all set to change the way people work. It has the potential to take the robot out of the human, i.e to take over repetitive, time-consuming, and rule-based processes. RPA thus has a lot of potential across industries.

Should you move to RPA now? Of course yes.

Regardless of the industry, any business process that can be automated can employ RPA. Especially, small to medium-size enterprises can really benefit from RPA and improve overall efficiency, giving them a competitive advantage that can help their business grow.

The healthcare and pharmaceutical industry is expected to grow the most in compound annual growth but the banking and financial sector are also catching up. They are almost entirely rule-based (except for customer service) and the heavy requirement for compliance can benefit from non-human intervention.

Social media write up: The world is advancing with all its potential across all industries, only making the functioning complicated, diverse, and requiring more human labor. This brought us to the invention of RPA, which automates almost everything that requires human interaction. While this may sound similar to screen-scraping and macros software technology, RPA has evolved beyond these solutions. For example, while macros use fixed, linear commands, bots have the flexibility to intuitively respond to stimuli and changes in business processes—increasing their intelligence over time. Also, in cases where you need multiple tools to run scripts that perform across multiple applications, RPA can simplify the way users automate tasks by interacting with multiple applications at once.