Robotic Process Automation(RPA)

Typically, robots operate three times faster than human workers. Robots are best suited for tasks that are repetitive, rule based and incorporate structured digital data. In a workplace RPA is generally used to automate day today labour intensive process freeing up high value employees time for activities time activities such as problem solving, exemption handling and troubleshooting.

A few real-life examples where RPA could be used in a bank would be payment processing, invoice management, reporting and reconciliation. Robots are very quickly extending today into the area of artificial intelligence which allows robots to make decisions and predictions. Therefore, the scope and applications of RPA are endless.

What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?

RPA is an acronym for Robotic Process Automation. RPA can be easily understood when we have a clear idea about each of the three words.

Robotic: an entity which is cable of being programmed by a computer for doing complex tasks is known as a robot. In terms of RPA, this task would be to mimic the human actions. In simpler terms, a robot is mimicking human behaviour.

Process: A sequence of steps, that lead to a meaningful activity or task is known as a process. It could be a process of switching on lights, it could be a process of making a dish and it could be even the process of making tea.

Automation: When a task happens automatically without human intervention it is then called automation.

Summarizing the above, RPA is a technology that is mimicking human beahviours to do a task that is processed without human intervention in repeatable and reliable manner.

Just like humans, robots can open emails, attachments, login to applications, read databases, collect data, follow if then decisions, filling forms and perform calculations. RPA solutions allows organizations to do more with less, minimizing risk with increased visibility and audit trails.

The top three RPA tools used in the market are ‘UiPath, blueprism’ and ‘Automation Anywhere’. And the most popular RPA tool among them are ‘UiPath’. Thus, this article will be focused on the ‘UiPath’ RPA tool only.

UiPath

The UiPath RPA platform consists of three main components; Studio, Robots, Orchestrator.

Studio is a highly visual intuitive automation tool with process recorder and pre-built drag and drop activities that enable people without developer skills to quickly create RPA workflows. So, in simple English it is a desktop application which is the integrated development environment or the IDE where developers build the robots.

Secondly, we have robots. Robots or software workers that run the automation created in studio. You get attended and unattended robots. Attended robots directly assist employees triggered by human commands while unattended robots run back office tasks and work autonomously in a physical or virtual environment.

Lastly, we have orchestrator. Orchestrator is an intelligent console that deploys robots’ schedules work and report on performance. Simply put it is a web application and it is also a mobile application so you can deploy schedule and manage robots from anywhere.

What types UiPath products available?

UiPath has the community edition and the Enterprise RPA platform.

1) UiPath Community Edition

This is a free platform and it is meant for individual developers. You will have access to Studio, Robot and Orchestrator. However, in this version, only up to two robots are available for your orchestrator.

2) UiPath Enterprise RPA platform

This is paid platform where you pay per license and it mainly for enterprise businesses. You will have access to Studio, Robot and Orchestrator. In this version, because you pay per license you can add many robots as you want. What most big companies do is they rent virtual machines or virtual desktops from companies like Amazon and they have thousands of robots running in the background when the back office runs, without any humans intervening that's what you call an unattended robot.

7 types of Robots you could try with UiPath

Robot 1: Clothing consultant

A user enters a city name, the robot then scrapes Google for the temperature and weather in that city, the robot then processes the data and decides which will then suggest a clothing type to the user.

Robot 2: Data capturing

A common daily task of a Data Captures life is copy-pasting data from an excel spreadsheet into a web or desktop application. This robot fully-automates that task. The robot copy-pastes 100 lines of customer data into their respective input fields of a web application and desktop application. The robot even performs both the web and desktop app data capturing simultaneously. This gets the job done in a fraction of the time that a human could with 100% accuracy.

Robot 3: Automation challenge

This is an RPA challenge created by UiPath to test a RPA Developer's ability to build a robust software robot. The goal of this challenge is to create a workflow that will input data from a spreadsheet into the form fields on the screen.

Robot 4: Real estate web scraping

A user enters a city name, the robot then scrapes thousands of real estate listing data in that city off the web. The data is then exported into a MS Excel spreadsheet, including the prices of the property, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and suburb location.

Robot 5: PDF invoice data scraping

Imagine the job of an admin employee is to copy-paste text from a PDF invoice into an excel spreadsheet and then repeat this task 1000 times for 1000 different invoices. Not only is this job extremely tedious and boring, but a human is very likely to make mistakes along the way. This robot fully-automates that process by looping through every PDF file in a folder, scraping the text and "pastes" the text into a spreadsheet. This robot is 8 times faster than a human with a 0% error rate.

Robot 6: Optical Character Recognition

What happens when the PDF file is a scanned image? How will UiPath read the text? The answer is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which converts text in image format to actual text. This robot loops through scanned PDFs, scrapes the text and exports it into a text file.

Robot 7: Email Automation

In this robot, the user specifies only the email addresses of interest, and then the robot saves a copy onto your machine of all emails and attachments in your Gmail inbox with those emails. The robot saves them into separate folders per email address and automatically sends an output report email to the developer displaying all logs of what emails have been saved and what errors have occurred.

How RPA could change workplace culture of your company?

1. Companies such as PwC has realized that process automation is something critical since they work with large number of data daily and it involves lot of manual work. As a strategy to improve processes and reduce costs in terms of improving efficiency, PwC is focused on utilizing UiPath. This will enable companies to change the status quo and the way many businesses operate.

2. When Big 4 Audit firms and many other reputed firms start realizing the benefits of using RPA, others quickly try to follow them and copy their best practices. It is crucial for your organization to adopt to new automation processes very fast or else you will be at the risk of losing your competitive advantage.

3. RPA will change how things will be done in companies. Departments such as Finance and Accounting generally tend to do lots of manual work on Excel. However, if the company decides to adopt to RPA it is vital that employees also learn how RPA operates. Suppose you are the accountant of a firm, you should know how to create the logic of automating a monotonous data entry operation using UiPath, Automation Anywhere or blueprism or any other RPA tool. It is the responsibility of companies to train their employees for RPA. This will enable the companies to increase productivity potential and profitability.

4. The market will automatically demand for RPA developers. The jobs available and their demands will also continue to change. If you work as a data entry operator now, in the future you might lose that job, because RPA will replace your job and instead look for an RPA developer who could automate 10 processes and replace all data entry operators.

5. RPA will become the new norm in handling business operations. It will impact the employment rate as majority of manual tasks will be done by Robots. Therefore, employees must ensure that they have necessary skills to survive in the new world of Robotic Process Automation or RPA.

6. Introduction of RPA means that employees will feel threatened, as Robots take over the processes. Employees will feel anxious with introduction of new technologies such as RPA. Companies should ease anxiety by arranging training programs communicating how this will benefit their daily work and the fact that they need to learn this new skill in order to add value to their existing job.

7. Employees should be created with an environment to reward by completion of certifications or appreciation speeches once their learning process is complete. Creating a community within the organization to share tips and tricks of using this new technology to benefit their daily work is one option companies could think of.

Conclusion

It is time for companies around the globe to change the way things are done. Traditional processes might be very time consuming. My suggestion is that it’s time to re-look at your manual processes. Identity the monotonous tasks that should be done by RPA Robots. This will reduce costs and as well as improve efficiency. The good thing about RPA tools are that they are not expensive as we think. I built seven Robots on my own without spending much. A company could make use of UiPath and perhaps automate few critical processes identified and pay only for the tasks you done by your Robot. If you are an Enterprise try the UiPath Enterprise RPA platform, you will only pay per license and you can add many Robots as you want. Amazon has done this; PwC is doing it now. Is your company ready to make change? If so, don’t wait, try it, experience it and you love this technology.