Robotic Process Automation: What, Why and How
Today Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a hot topic with 72% of organizations expected to use it by 2020 according to Deloitte. So, what is RPA, why it is needed and how it is used?
The Business Problem
Many enterprises have large number of routine repetitive business processes which consume significant amount of employee time, here are a couple of examples:
- A person needs to input a Purchase Requisition in a ERP system based on item description, type and other parameters. There are a lot of manipulations which are standardized: you have several scenarios each executed the same way over and over, the only different parameters being quantity, price, item type, item name etc.
- Routine audits when a person needs to check system data against some other sources (i.e. email, pdf, or a text document), correct the discrepancy in the system and make a note in the spreadsheet on the erroneous transaction.
- A bank employee needs to register new customer based on an application form which involves data validation, data input into multiple systems and a notification to a customer that his/her application was processed.
What is similar across these scenarios is that they involve multiple data sources and sometimes multiple systems. To reduce the amount of manual labor involved and number of errors in these routine repetitive transactions enterprises need to find a way to automate these processes.
Solutions Space
There are several ways to address the business problem including: Scripting, BPM, RPA, Cognitive Computing.
Scripting is the simplest approach which is limited in it’s applicability and cognitive computing is a separate evolving domain and a subject for its own article. We will take a closer look at RPA and how it compares to more widely known BPM.
BPM is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. (Wikipedia)
RPA is a form of business process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers. (Wikipedia)
In a nutshell, RPA is a software solution which interacts with multiple data sources and/or applications in the same way a human operator would do (i.e. clicking buttons, editing fields, opening attachments and saving documents). Unlike human it can do this at a much higher speed and with less errors.
The difference between BPM and RPA is summarized in the table below but in context of applications the key distinction is that BPM interacts with applications at the business logic and data layers, and RPA at the application presentation layer.
Key RPA Solution Capabilities
RPA solutions from different vendors utilize different approaches and architecture, but in general the following capabilities are essential part of an RPA solution:
- Designer — business friendly visual tool to design processes which need to be automated with drag-n-drop approach and no coding involved.
- Execution/Orchestration Engine — component responsible for execution of the process automated in the Designer
- Library — contains all automated business processes created in the Designer to be used on-demand.
- Monitoring and Reporting — environment to track processes being run by Execution/Orchestration Engine.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — optional component enabling extraction of characters, numbers and text from various of documents including pdfs and document scans.
On top of these mandatory capabilities RPA solutions often feature scalability, enterprise grade security and fault-tolerance. RPA by itself does not mandate the use of Artificial Intelligence although AI can be used to enhance RPA capabilities.
RPA Market
RPA market is still evolving representing a typical “hockey stick” we witness in the emerging areas like AI, SDN/NFV, M2M/IoT.
Looking at the breakdown by industry, there is no surprise that Banks, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) is the leading segment, since the industry operations involve large amount of manual labor in relations to customer management (forms, applications, claims etc.)
With many industries undergoing Digital Transformation in the pursuit of operational efficiency and cost reduction RPA is expected to drive workforce Digitalization and become widely adopted across verticals.
Robots WILL steal some of our jobs.
