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Robotic process automation (RPA) tools are one of three types of software that fall under the greater umbrella of process automation, along with business process management (BPM) software and process mining software. These products may integrate with one another or work side by side to enhance end-to-end business processes.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform. These tasks can include queries, calculations and maintenance of records and transactions.
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RPA technology consists of software robots (bots) that can mimic a human worker. RPA bots can log into applications, enter data, calculate and complete tasks and then log out. Currently, practitioners divide RPA technologies into three broad categories: probots, knowbots and chatbots.
- Probots are bots that follow simple, repeatable rules to process data.
- Knowbots are bots that search the internet to gather and store user-specified information.
- Chatbots are virtual agents who can respond to customer queries in real time.
RPA software is not part of an organization's IT infrastructure. Instead, it sits on top of it, enabling a company to implement the technology quickly and efficiently -- all without changing the existing infrastructure and systems. What distinguishes RPA from traditional IT automation is the ability of the RPA software to be aware and adapt to changing circumstances, exceptions and new situations. Once RPA software has been trained to capture and interpret the actions of specific processes in existing software applications, it can then manipulate data, trigger responses, initiate new actions and communicate with other systems autonomously.
Benefits of RPA
Robotic process automation technology can help organizations on their digital transformation journeys by:
- Enabling better customer service.
- Ensuring business operations and processes comply with regulations and standards.
- Allowing processes to be completed much more rapidly.
- Providing improved efficiency by digitizing and auditing process data.
- Creating cost savings for manual and repetitive tasks.
- Enabling employees to be more productive.
Applications of RPA
Some of the top applications of RPA include:
- Customer service: RPA can help companies offer better customer service by automating contact center tasks, including verifying e-signatures, uploading scanned documents and verifying information for automatic approvals or rejections.
- Accounting: Organizations can use RPA for general accounting, operational accounting, transactional reporting
and budgeting. - Financial services: Companies in the financial services industry can use RPA for foreign exchange payments, automating account openings and closings, managing audit requests and processing insurance claims.
- Healthcare: Medical organizations can use RPA for handling patient records, claims, customer support, account management, billing, reporting
and analytics. - Human resources: RPA can automate HR tasks, including onboarding and offboarding, updating employee information and timesheet submission processes.
- Supply chain management: RPA can be used for procurement, automating order processing and payments, monitoring inventory levels and tracking shipments.
The evolution of RPA
Although the term 'robotic process automation' can be traced to the early 2000s, it had been developing for a number of years previously. RPA evolved from three key technologies: screen scraping, workflow automation and artificial intelligence. Screen scraping is the process of collecting screen display data from a legacy application so that the data can be displayed by a more modern user interface. The advantages of workflow automation software, which eliminates the need for manual data entry and increases order fulfillment rates, include increased speed, efficiency and accuracy. Lastly, artificial intelligence involves the ability of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intervention and intelligence.
Today, RPA software is particularly useful for organizations that have many different and complicated systems that need to interact together fluidly. For instance, if an electronic form from a human resource system is missing a zip code, traditional automation software would flag the form as having an exception and an employee would handle the exception by looking up the correct zip code and entering it on the form. Once the form is complete, the employee might send it on to payroll so the information can be entered into the organization's payroll system. With RPA technology, however, software that has the ability to adapt, self-learn and self-correct would handle the exception and interact with the payroll system without human assistance.
Top RPA vendors
- Automation Anywhere Inc. provides an enterprise digital workforce platform geared toward procure-to-pay, quote-to-cash, HR, claims processing and other back-office processes.
- Blue Prism focuses on providing organizations in regulated industries with
more agile virtual workforces, offering desktop-aligned robots that are defined and managed centrally. - EdgeVerve Limited, an Infosys company, helps enterprises modernize customer service, improve business processes and enhance operational productivity.
- HelpSystems enables companies to streamline IT and business operations by automating tasks and workflows without the need to write code.
- UiPath offers an open platform to help organizations efficiently automate business processes.
Workfusion combines robotics, AI-powered cognitive automationand workforce orchestration to automate enterprise business processes.
What to look for in RPA software
When enterprise leaders look for RPA technologies, they should consider a number of things, including:
- Scalability: Organizations shouldn't select RPA software that requires them to deploy software robots to desktops or virtualized environments. They should look for RPA platforms that can be centrally managed and scale massively.
- Speed: Enterprises should be able to design and test new robotic processes in a few hours or less, as well as optimize the bots to work quickly.
- Reliability: As companies launch robots to automate hundreds or even thousands of tasks, they should look for tools with built-in monitoring and analytics that enable them to monitor the health of their systems.
- Simplicity: Organizations should look for products that are simple enough that any employee in the business can build and use them to handle various kinds of work, including collecting data and turning content into information that enables leaders to make the best business decisions.
- Intelligence: The best RPA tools can support simple task-based activities, read and write to any data source, and take advantage of more advanced learning to further improve automation.
- Enterprise-class: Companies should look for tools that are built from the ground up for enterprise-grade scalability, reliability
and manageability.
C-level decision-making around RPA
Though automation software is expected to replace up to 140 million full-time employees worldwide by 2025, many high-quality jobs will be created for those who maintain and improve RPA software.
When software robots do replace people in the enterprise, C-level executives need to be responsible for ensuring that business outcomes are achieved and new governance policies are met.
Robotic process automation technology also requires that the CTO/CIO take more of a leadership role and assume accountability for the business outcomes and the risks of deploying RPA tools.
Additionally, the COO, CIO and chief human resources officer, as well as the relevant C-level executive who owns the process being automated, should all work toward ensuring the availability of an enterprise-grade, secure platform for controlling and operating bots across systems.
Where the robotic process automation market is heading
A Global Market Insights Inc. report expects the RPA market to reach $5 billion by 2024. The increased adoption of RPA technologies by organizations to enhance their capabilities and performance and boost cost savings will reportedly drive the growth of the robotic process automation market most during that time.
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Continue Reading About robotic process automation (RPA)
Related Terms
- machine-to-machine (M2M)
- Machine-to-machine, or M2M, is a broad label that can be used to describe any technology that enables networked devices to ... See complete definition
- open API (public API)
- An open API, also known as a public API, is an application programming interface made publically available to software developers. See complete definition
- RFID (radio frequency identification)
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- Margaret Rouse asks:
Which benefits of RPA software does your enterprise find most enticing?
- The Future of Work: AI Assisting Humans to be More Productive–Citrix
- End-User Service Delivery: Why IT Must Move Up the Stack to Deliver Real Value–Citrix
Vendor Resources
- 7 Predictions for the 2019 RPA Market–Automation Anywhere
- Robotic Process Automation Market Snapshot–Automation Anywhere
Robotic process automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on the notion of metaphorical software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.[1]
In traditional workflowautomation tools, a software developer produces a list of actions to automate a task and interface to the back-end system using internal application programming interfaces (APIs) or dedicated scripting language. In contrast, RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. This can lower the barrier to use of automation in products that might not otherwise feature APIs for this purpose.
RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user interface testing tools. These tools also automate interactions with the GUI, and often do so by repeating a set of demonstration actions performed by a user. RPA tools differ from such systems including features that allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, receiving email containing an invoice, extracting the data, and then typing that into a bookkeeping system.
- 3Impact on employment
Historic evolution[edit]
As a form of automation, the same concept has been around for a long time in the form of screen scraping but RPA is considered to be a significant technological evolution of this technique in the sense that new software platforms are emerging which are sufficiently mature, resilient, scalable and reliable to make this approach viable for use in large enterprises[2] (who would otherwise be reluctant due to perceived risks to quality and reputation).
By way of illustration of how far the technology has developed since its early form in screen scraping, it is useful to consider the example cited in one academic study. Users of one platform at Xchanging - a UK-based global company which provides business processing, technology and procurement services across the globe - anthropomorphized their robot into a co-worker named 'Poppy' and even invited 'her' to the Christmas party.[3][4] Such an illustration perhaps serves to demonstrate the level of intuition, engagement and ease of use of modern RPA technology platforms, that leads their users (or 'trainers') to relate to them as beings rather than abstract software services. The 'code-free' nature of RPA (described below) is just one of a number of significant differentiating features of RPA vs. screen scraping.[5]
Deployment[edit]
The hosting of RPA services also aligns with the metaphor of a software robot, with each robotic instance having its own virtual workstation, much like a human worker. The robot uses keyboard and mouse controls to take actions and execute automations. Normally all of these actions take place in a virtual environment and not on screen; the robot does not need a physical screen to operate, rather it interprets the screen display electronically. The scalability of modern solutions based on architectures such as these owes much to the advent of virtualization technology, without which the scalability of large deployments would be limited by available capacity to manage physical hardware and by the associated costs. The implementation of RPA in business enterprises has shown dramatic cost savings when compared to traditional non-RPA solutions.[6]
There are however several risks with RPA. Criticism include risks of stifling innovation and creating a more complex maintenance environment of existing software that now needs to consider the use of graphical user interfaces in a way they weren't intended to be used.[7]
Impact on employment[edit]
According to Harvard Business Review, most operations groups adopting RPA have promised their employees that automation would not result in layoffs.[3] Instead, workers have been redeployed to do more interesting work. One academic study highlighted that knowledge workers did not feel threatened by automation: they embraced it and viewed the robots as team-mates.[4] The same study highlighted that, rather than resulting in a lower 'headcount', the technology was deployed in such a way as to achieve more work and greater productivity with the same number of people.
Conversely however, some analysts proffer that RPA represents a threat to the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.[8] The thesis behind this notion is that RPA will enable enterprises to 'repatriate' processes from offshore locations into local data centers, with the benefit of this new technology. The effect, if true, will be to create high value jobs for skilled process designers in onshore locations (and within the associated supply chain of IT hardware, data center management, etc.) but to decrease the available opportunity to low skilled workers offshore. On the other hand, this discussion appears to be healthy ground for debate as another academic study was at pains to counter the so-called 'myth' that RPA will bring back many jobs from offshore.[4]
Impact on society[edit]
Academic studies[9][10] project that RPA, among other technological trends, is expected to drive a new wave of productivity and efficiency gains in the global labour market. Although not directly attributable to RPA alone, Oxford University conjectures that up to 35% of all jobs may have been automated by 2035.[9]
In a TEDx talk[11] hosted by UCL in London, entrepreneur David Moss explains that digital labour in the form of RPA is not only likely to revolutionise the cost model of the services industry by driving the price of products and services down, but that it is likely to drive up service levels, quality of outcomes and create increased opportunity for the personalisation of services.
Meanwhile, Professor Willcocks, author of the LSE paper[10] cited above, speaks of increased job satisfaction and intellectual stimulation, characterising the technology as having the ability to 'take the robot out of the human',[12] a reference to the notion that robots will take over the mundane and repetitive portions of people's daily workload, leaving them to be redeployed into more interpersonal roles or to concentrate on the remaining, more meaningful, portions of their day.
Robotic process automation 2.0[edit]
Robotic process automation 2.0, often referred to as 'unassisted RPA,'[13] is the next generation of RPA related technologies. Technological advancements and improvements around artificial intelligence technologies are making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the benefits of RPA without dedicating a large budget for development work.[14]
While unassisted RPA has a number of benefits, it is not without drawbacks. Utilizing unassisted RPA, a process can be run on a computer without needing input from a user, freeing up that user to do other work. However, in order to be effective, very clear rules need to be established in order for the processes to run smoothly.[15]
RPA in business[edit]
Grand View Research, Inc. performed a study in October, 2018, and said that the primary companies in the RPA market included: Automation Anywhere, Inc.; Blue Prism Group PLC; UIPath Inc.; Be Informed B.V.; OpenSpan; and Jacada, Inc.[16] UIPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, NICE are the Leaders in the industry according to research firm Everest Group.[17] A recent report released in 2019 predicts the CAGR of robotic process automation market in India at 20% annually[18].
References[edit]
- ^AI interns:Software already taking jobs from humans, New Scientist
- ^Robotic Automation Emerges as a Threat to Traditional Low Cost Outsourcing, HfS Research, archived from the original on 2015-09-21
- ^ abWhat knowledge workers stand to gain from automation, Harvard Business Review
- ^ abcRobotic Process Automation at Xchanging(PDF), London School of Economics
- ^Ciufudean, Calin (2018-07-10). 'Industry 4.0`S Product Development Process Aided by Robotic Process Automation'. Robotics & Automation Engineering Journal. 3 (3). doi:10.19080/raej.2018.03.555614. ISSN2577-2899.
- ^[1]
- ^DeBrusk, Chris. 'Five Robotic Process Automation Risks to Avoid'. MIT Sloan Management Review. MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
- ^Gartner Predicts 2014: Business and IT Services Are Facing the End of Outsourcing as We Know It, Gartner
- ^ abTHE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION?, archived from the original on 2016-02-05
- ^ abNine likely scenarios arising from the growing use of software robots(PDF), London School of Economics
- ^White Collar Robots: The Virtual Workforce, TEDx Talks
- ^Technology is not about to steal your job, www.techworld.com
- ^Technologies, AIMDek (2018-08-29). 'Evolution of Robotic Process Automation (RPA): The Path to Cognitive RPA'. Medium. Retrieved 2019-01-28.
- ^'Robotic Process Automation and the Age of the Digital Workforce'. SDLC Partners. Retrieved 2019-01-28.
- ^Brain, David. 'RPA Technical Insights, Part 3: Assisted or Unassisted Robotic Process Automation: How to choose the right delivery model for your project'. blog.symphonyhq.com. Retrieved 2019-01-28.
- ^'Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market Worth $3.11 Billion by 2025'. www.grandviewresearch.com. Retrieved 2019-03-25.
- ^Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Technology Vendor Landscape with Products PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2019
- ^'The Indian Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market 2019-2025: Led by UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, Kofax, and WorkFusion - ResearchAndMarkets.com'. www.businesswire.com. 2019-09-04. Retrieved 2019-09-18.
Sources[edit]
- Jobs, productivity and the great decoupling, by Professor McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business.
- Rise of the software machines, Economist Magazine.
- London School of Economics Releases First in a Series of RPA Case Studies, Reuters
- Humans and Machines: The role of people in technology-driven organisations, Economist Magazine.
- Robotic Automation as Threat to Traditional Low Cost Outsourcing, HfS Research.
- Times BPO Supplement, Raconteur, June 2013
- Visions of the Future: The Next Decade in BPO, Outsource Magazine.
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