RPA Robots in Digital Transformation

Software Robots mimics human interactions not just Mouse Clicks, Key board Navigation's, Application Logins with Web, Desktop application but much more are often called Bots that are programmed to do repetitive or sequential tasks of Workplace Business Process Operations 24/7.

These Bots are not only cost effective and time enabler but support many of the Organizations digital transformation initiatives to achieve profitability and remain competitive. Global spending according to Gartner will pace a total of $2.4 billion by 2022 and nearly 85% of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA.

The biggest early adopters included Banks, Insurance companies, Utilities, Telecommunications and Transportation companies. Moreover any Industry's Workplace Business Operation which knits its Business Processes with different applications and platforms, or work involves mundane tasks performed manually are excellent candidates for RPA.

The ever growing adaptation of RPA by Industry is on account of its Low Code/No Code features with Drag and Drop features using robust framework and thousands of Library of Functions for Task Events while facilitation Monitoring & Scheduling thousands of Bots from a Control Room. 

Compare this with all the nine yards involved in Coding efforts which requires extensive Business Process requirements gathering and spending enormous time in search for highly skilled developers to build Robust, Modular and Scalable solutions.

Today’s Bots are easily built using Robotics Process Automation (RPA) tools offered by different vendors to support and improve accuracy and efficiency by automating repetitive tasks using Desktop Applications, Custom and Native application seamlessly. Some products also have Cognitive supportive capabilities like Machine Learning and AI with various degrees of maturity. 

RPA is now a new branch of IT Specialization area in the World of Automation euphoria and that is here to stay and is maturing very fast to meet demanding Business Workplace Process needs. 

Selecting an RPA Vendor tool from among the current offerings, one needs to focus on its features that are already build and its ease in building & deploying Bots along with support for its Maintenance, Monitoring, Scheduling and Reporting. One of my common thumb rules as well a proven one is to favor products which have Open Community Support with larger base that potentially would have well rounded features coming from the ground zero and also would have higher staying power in this fast-newer emerging technology.

An RPA tool should also have support for multiple platforms like Windows and Linux which are common workplace OS platforms to support various Desktop applications such as MS Office and Google G Suite. 

Many medium to large Organizations have either a large Offshore/Onsite support folks for their Business Process activities and hence any RPA product should also fully support VDI infrastructure products such as Citrix, Amazon WorkSpaces, IBM Cloud, VMware Horizon Cloud and other major VDI products.

RPA Bots Utilization

RPA Robots are game changers that can automate and perform very large repetitive transactions in simple or complex Organizational Business Operational processes. Robots can also be built to automate and streamline complex business interactions by integrating various operational tasks with multiple applications systems and channels. 

Here are some simple to complex RPA activities that can be automated   

1. Opening user emails to download specific attachments into a network folder
2. Moving files from a source directory/folder to another target source including from and/to FTP server
3.  Logging into ERP or Native or Web applications and updating specific forms using data from files including CSV
4.  Scrapping data from Websites to extract selective data such as Stock or Ticker Prices or in its entirety data sets
5. Scanning PDF including support for OCR to convert them into text or hand written documents
6. Selecting specific fields from Contract documents using AI based pattern matching
7. Connecting to ODBC, JDBC supported Databases like Oracle, SQL Server to perform CRUD Operations
8. Streamlining and supporting seamlessly major and key Business Operations by building workflows across multiple native custom applications using virtual user concept in the absence of API’s

Some key Industry Use Cases

1. Data Intensive Operation Companies that Extract & Capture data by Scrapping the Web sites and converting data from different media types & formats including PDF with OCR requirements
2.  Finance Organizations benefiting by accelerating their Mortgage Processing, Fraud Analysis tasks, Configuring and building business rules for Loan Origination, Automating tedious tasks like Bank Reconciliation reporting from different applications
3. Facilitating faster Clinical trials and drug approvals oversight of Pharmacovigilance (PV) cases by reducing errors and enhanced compliance in a reduced process cycle time
4. Automating Transportation and Logistical & Business Operations, Shipment Scheduling & Tracking by collating data and building Workflows thus increasing efficiencies and reducing costs
5. Retail industry integrating their Invoice Processing and Credit Collections to streamline End to End Order-to-cash processes
6. Telecommunication industry many manual repetitive rules-based processes
7. Utilities Industry's highly traditional regulation driven marketplace rule driven process
8. Lastly any Organization whose Business process are Rule based driven and are manual or Process interweaves through manual extraction of data data from many Native or Custom Applications including Web with tedious tasks can be automated using RPA Bots

Major RPA frameworks have fully functional GUI studios to build Robots using Drag and Drop features with enriched library in much shorter time window with Low Code No Code development efforts. One could also build Self learning Intelligent Robots that learn from repeatable actions using ML & AI features.