RPA-Making Businesses More Productive and Efficient

 

What is RPA

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation which essentially means Automation of Business Process involving Manual Tasks (tasks performed by human workforce on Computer *) which are Repetitive in nature, have defined set of Decision Rules and don’t require “Human Intelligence** “ to decide course of action. Lets try to understand it with an example.

Example – Ms. X’s daily work include to Download a csv File at 6 PM sharp from a given URL / Website, save it to a Local Folder, Open it and search for a Specific Text. If searched text found then a part of this file need to be copied and mailed to another department of the office with specific Subject line as “Action required for today dd/mm/yyyy”. In case Text is not found then drop an email with specific Subject Line as “No Action required today dd/mm/yyyy”.

As we see in above example, the performed task – 

1. Is Repetitive as it need to be performed daily
2. Has  specific set of Decision Rules for Download, Save, Search & E-Mail
3. Do not require “Human Intelligence” 

RPA is a software system that makes it simple to design, deploy, and manage software robots (a.k.a. BOTS) that mimic human actions while dealing with digital systems and software. Like humans, these BOTS can grasp what’s on a screen, complete the correct keystrokes, traverse systems, discover and retrieve data, and do a variety of prescribed operations following a defined set of rules at defined time/interval OR on occurrence of an defined event. So now the question is-

How RPA can help business

In today’s Digital world almost all industries have manpower deployed in offices who perform specific set of tasks based on documented standard operating procedures (SOP) on computers to support business functions. However just performing a repetitive set of tasks day in day out, not only it may lead to Reduced Productivity and Human Error due to very monotonous nature but it can also lead to Employee Unsatisfaction. In either case “Who is at Risk ?” And very simple answer to question “The Business”. 

This is where RPA can help business, by adopting appropriate RPA Tools business can address all 3 problem areas 

• Productivity – as these Solutions (BOTS) not only mimic Human Action they also doe it “Faster”
• Human Error – BOTS are nothing but small programs to follow a standard operating procedure and hence they do not pose Risk of Human Error due to Typo , Misreading
• Job Satisfaction – As BOTS take away load of monotonous and repetitive tasks from employee, now person can focus on tasks need Human intelligence and use individual’s  expertise thus leading to increased job satisfaction which is Win-Win for both Employee and Employer.

In Summary RPA helps business to increase Profitability and achieve better Employee Satisfaction. According to Kofax (Automation Vendor) When properly configured, software robots can increase a team’s capacity for work by 35% to 50%. 

So as we now understand how RPA can help increase Business profitability, next step is to explore the Automation Tools out there and determine which is most suitable for the specific business process. 

RPA Tools

One thing is to note that Automation didn’t came to light all of a sudden, automation was there from quite long in form of software Test Automation or say workflow management tools, so it would not be wrong to say that it is evolved over a period of time by taking clue from testing / workflow tools. The RPA industry is made up of both brand-new, specially designed solutions and older technologies that have been updated with fresh capabilities to facilitate automation. Some of these were initially tools for business process management (BPM). The terms “workflow automation” and “work process management” are used by certain companies to describe their products.

According to Forrester research, the global RPA software industry is anticipated to reach $6.5 billion by 2025. Currently there are more than 20 RPA Tools in the market and list is growing, following are few Key Players of the Automation market which are consistently enhancing their offerings.   

• Automation Anywhere
• UiPath
• Power Automate by Microsoft
• Blue Prism
• PEGA
• Appian
• WorkFusion
• NICE
• Kofax

and many more. Take a closer look for a comparative study of Top 5 RPA Vendors. Also, in order to understand which one suits to your needs refer please – How to Choose the Right RPA Tool

What is an RPA BOT

As we discussed in one of the para above that BOTs are nothing but piece of code developed using RPA Tools to mimic the actions performed by Human being for given process. However there could be 2 kind of RPA BOTs-

1. Attended – These are piece of code which are activated by a person at will. 
2. Non Attended – These BOTS are scheduled to run at specific time OR on the occurrence of certain event.

Question arises when one should go for Un-Attended BOT and under what circumstances Attended Bot is better. The answer to this question lies with How well process Analysis is done to chart out the BOT requirement at first place? It requires a disciplined process to evaluate the Need and Scope of Automation of a given manual process/function. We’ll cover it as separate topic. Continuing to our current topic lets look at some of the Key capabilities of a BOT

What all Functions an RPA BOT can perform?

An RPA bot can mimic many functions performed by human, here are few generic applications

• Can browse through Web Site pages and collate data in files
• Can interact with Mail Client like Outlook , scan through mails and perform action as per given criteria
• Can process data from Multiple Text / Word / Excel files to generate Required Report
• Can mimic Key punches on Computer 

There ae few more capabilities about which we keep getting questions, would try to cover those as well.

Can RPA extract data from pdf? 

There are 2 kind of PDFs one is actual pdf file prepared using Adobe standard and other one are scanned images “saved as PDF”. Getting data from actual PDF files is like cake walk for most of the RPA Tools however reading text from “Scanned images saved as PDF” could be tricky and depends upon the capability of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Engine used by RPA Tool. We have seen high success ratio with “Abby fine Reader” and “Tesseract” OCR engines.

Can RPA convert speech to text? 

There are RPA Tools employing Cognitive technologies like Speech Recognition, Machine Learning to automate Complex Judgement based tasks (normally reserved for Human Being) , one such example is IBM’s Watson speech to text API.

Can RPA interact with traditional SQL database?

Yes, Many RPA Tools have capability to connect with variety of Databases and execute SQL. This aspect is something must be evaluated as it could be the key for deciding to go for Attended or Non-attended BOTs.

Can RPA work on Unstructured data?

A BOT may need to use Cognitive Capabilities to first convert Unstructured Data in to Structured Data. It could be using OCR (Optical Character Recognition),  NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning to Convert Data in to Structured sets. However when we talk about “Unstructured Data” we refer to “Big Data” which in turns may leads to “Volumes” of Data and that’s something which can challenge RPA Tool’s Capabilities.

Can RPA recognize voice commands?

This is again leads to Cognitive capabilities of RPA Tools and as mentioned above there is significant progress done in this area one such example is IBM Watson

When RPA is not suitable

While these Automation Tools offer a lot of functionalities, one must not forget to evaluate these software against following scenarios

• Huge Data Volume – If Data Volume in question is too high one must ask the capability of RPA tool to process data in parallel. For example lets assume an Excel with 100000 data rows need to be scanned through by traditional RPA tools it may take quite long to process as Command Sequence will use “For Loop” to go through each and every row of Excel sheet which could be much slower and can create frustration; as a person would rather use some Excel Formulas to get the desired results even faster. So whenever there is Huge Data Volume involved there are 2 options

• Either look for tool which supports ETL functions instead of looping through Row by Row 

• OR find out dependency / criticality of processing time if it’s not much it’s Ok for RPA tool to take longer and run in background while person is Free to do something else thus effectively creating bandwidth.

• Complex Decision – Another challenge for RPA tools at this stage is if process involves Critical Decision requiring Human Intelligence for decision making . One example could be Processing PDF’s with hand written text, it’s observed that accuracy of output from RPA tools in such cases is not always 100% and also depends upon the quality of scan.

Will RPA Replace Human

The main feature which differentiate Human from an RPA BOT is ability to take Complex Decision based on Intelligence. However with help of advancements in the area of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, RPA Tools have already started offering solutions using cognitive capabilities such Speech Processing, OCR, NLP therefore it wont be wrong to say that sooner or later Many processes would be completely automated but still it’s too soon to conclude if RPA would replace Human completely.

Conclusion

In last few years RPA as technology has made significant progress. Any smart business or person would want to use it’s potential to free up time and resources being wasted in mundane tasks by employing RPA BOTS thus creating more bandwidth to focus on activities requiring Human Intelligence, Experience and Individual Expertise. Now with advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, it has opened more options where business can be benefited by using BOTS to make independent decisions based on judgment and that’s precisely we are discussing in our next topic – “Intelligent Automation“

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* In this article we are discussing Automation of tasks performed by human using computer i.e. automation would be done by appropriate software tools (Software Robots/ BOTs) . We are not covering Task involving Physical Movement like in manufacturing industry though those tasks can also be covered under Robotics Automation but would need Robots (Mechanical Robots)

** Incorporating cognitive technologies like ML, speech recognition, and natural language processing into RPA may help businesses accelerate their automation efforts by automating higher-order activities that formerly needed human intelligence and decision-making skills.