How RPA Can Help Companies Be Data-Driven
Companies are becoming more data-driven than ever before. With the advent of sophisticated business tools, they are amassing a massive amount of data to generate transparency, insight and drive action.
The abundance of data garnered from these systems is crucial, enabling businesses to synthesize and harness key patterns and trends to their competitive advantage. However, the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming, with many companies struggling to get a hold of their most useful asset. Data from online marketing technology platforms informing which images drive more traffic to websites, or supply chain data such as how extreme weather conditions influence purchasing decisions in different regions, can be extremely beneficial to making data-driven decisions. There is a caveat: gathering the data can be an extremely manual, repetitive, and error-prone process.
RPA enabled Real Time Reporting
Situation
At Cervello, we recently built an RPA solution for a client that gathered sales data from a leading eCommerce platform using UiPath, a large RPA vendor and platform provider. The platform stores sales diagnostic data at the business unit, region and vendor level. A CPG client required hourly downloads and diagnostics at the regional level across global sales. The process involved the download, transformation and aggregation of thousands of files and was performed manually by an internal team. The team was using an in-house solution built with Java and Selenium to enable partial automation, but it often needed manual intervention and struggled with continuous changes to the interface of the portal.
Approach
The process presented several technical challenges, including two-factor authentication, changing regional languages, and a constantly shifting user interface. This required the existing Java and Selenium process to be run in an attended fashion, for ease of manual intervention and support. However, this was inefficient and proved to be a drain on resource time.
Cervello’s developers built a fully functioning RPA solution in five days — a much shorter turnaround than traditional automation solutions. Once built, the solution was deployed to the client’s virtualized environment and scheduled to run continuously, providing near real time insights.
Impact
Our solution transformed the data gathering process, offering a more robust, secure and transparent process than the existing solution.
The biggest impact was in reliability. Our solution was fully unattended and enabled the team to focus on more strategic analysis and value adding activities. Error rates were reduced by over 40% and the enhanced data quality had remarkable impacts on the calibre of downstream reporting and decision making. This built credibility for the technology and began to rebuild confidence in the accuracy of reports.
Another advantage was the RPA solution’s ability to be modified with minimal overhead. Adding and removing business units, regions or individual products was performed via an input file. To cater to special retail shopping events, such as holiday seasons, the bot could be altered to run more frequently without changing the build of the bot itself. This enabled our client to access near real-time sales data to enable rapid response to promotions at peak shopping periods.
Gathering Data From Alternative Sources
Unstructured data doesn’t easily fit into a tabular format, like a Microsoft Excel table. It is much more difficult to analyse and why it was often cast aside by organizations until recently. With the emergence of AI powered analytical tools this data is being becoming more accessible and drive business insight.
Through the integration with these tools, RPA can also be used to gather data from alternate mediums such as image and video. At Cervello, we built a solution that leveraged RPA’s machine-learning capabilities, integrated with a computer vision cognitive engine, to analyze videos and tag elements with descriptors and sentiment analysis. These data points were then compiled and visualized through Tableau, to provide rapid and impactful insights in a visually appealing format.
This solution was deployed for a large New York based advertising company to support the review of their client advertising portfolios. Instead of a a human having to watch thousands of advertisements, we could get a bot to do it instead! The data provided by the bot was superior to that of the manual operators, in terms of both time taken and comprehensiveness of data recorded. Although unorthodox from gathering data through a platform, an RPA solution proved to be an excellent option.
RPA Can Streamline Your Data Gathering
The solution described above was for one eCommerce platform, but RPA can be built around any platform a user interacts with, including ERP, CRM and bespoke legacy systems. Contact us at Cervello if you are interested in a similar solution, with our expertise, we can support you with a better way to gather your data and extract valuable insights.
Companies today have more tools at their disposal than ever before and analyzing data, both structured and unstructured, is a key business problem for many. Instead of tying up resources or investing in costly, complicated integrations, use RPA to quickly acquire and integrate the data. A data-driven organization is only as good as the data it uses, and RPA is an excellent way to ensure rapid, accurate and reliable data.
This post was written in collaboration with my colleague Ali Jameel. If you have an interest in discussing anything mentioned here further, feel free to connect on LinkedIn.
About Cervello, a Kearney company
Cervello, a Kearney company is a data and analytics consulting firm and part of Kearney, a leading management consulting firm. We help our leading clients win by offering unique expertise in data and analytics, and in the challenges associated with connecting data. We focus on performance management, customer and supplier relationships, and data monetization and products, serving functions from sales to finance. Our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) expertise allows us to transform back-office functions for our clients, providing streamlined operations, enhanced insights and consistent analytics, enabling better decision making across your organization.
