A brief overview of Robotic Process Automation
Online shopping has become the lifeline of our economy and a part of our daily lives. Right from electronic items to grocery, everything can be ordered online. But have you ever wondered how these processes are done at the back-end? This is where the role of Robotic Process Automation comes into the picture.
What is Robotic Process Automation(RPA)?
Robotic process automation definition says that it is a software that enables business users to automate manual and repetitive tasks with business users. It works on the motto that ‘anything that can be automated, should be automated’.
Robotic process automation providers have estimated that the global revenue generated by robotic process automation(RPA) will reach $1.89 billion in 2021,a sharp increase of 19.5% from 2020. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe economic pressures, the RPA market is still expected to expand at double-digit rates through 2024.
“The key driver for RPA projects is their ability to improve process quality, speed, and productivity, each of which is increasingly important as organizations try to meet the demands of cost reduction during COVID-19,” said Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. “Enterprises can quickly make headway on their digital optimization initiatives by investing in RPA software, and the trend isn’t going away anytime soon.”
Hence, various sectors have started incorporating robotic process automation tools to make their systems more nimble. Robotic process automation in banking, healthcare, and supply chain management are some prominent examples.
What does robotic automation software exactly do?
Until a few years ago, most of the repetitive jobs like data entry and typing, form filling, extraction of information were done by humans. However, in doing so, most of the workforce of a company would spend quality time on quantitative work which does not yield any better results. But what if all the cumbersome part of this work was done by someone else and the workers would have had spare time to do valuable work? Sounds cool right. Well, this is exactly what RPA does.
Imagine RPA as a virtual robot or a team of bots who are ready to do any kind of work you want them to do. The only condition is that one has to give clear instructions on what and how to carry out specific processes. Here, a human trains the RPA bot to mimic every movement. For instance, the movement of the mouse, typed interaction with all the systems and applications like logging in and out, transferring data, so on and so forth. Once this process is complete, the bot will repeatedly execute these steps, accurately, and with higher efficiency than humans.
Now, the main question is how is RPA different from traditional automation.
Well, every process needs to be upgraded or scaled according to different types of work. In the traditional automation process, this would mean changing the entire working system. On the other hand, RPA bots on the front-level user interface interact with the systems just like humans. Also, RPA bots are agnostic and hence can automate processes for multiple processes. All in all, traditional automation cannot be updated once set but RPA can be scaled and upgraded according to the needs.
RPA offers various advantages. Some advantages which should be considered while studying RPA are listed below:
- Better efficiency:
Since tasks like data entry and accounting consist of huge volumes of data, it is quite natural for humans to make mistakes. But, with bots, such errors are minimized thus increasing efficiency.
2.Easier workflow analytics :
It is very difficult to track the progress of human workers as every person works at a different pace and manner. However, RPA tools can be tracked down to utterly minor tasks and the smallest time increments.
3.Enhances customer relationship:
RPA enhances customer experience as most of the low-level customer requests are handled automatically.
4.Greater flexibility:
It is found that the data centers, servers, networking deployment are significantly more responsive and agile than infrastructure that lacks the RPA tools.
5.Increases productivity:
Since employees spend more time on value-added work, productivity increases and yields better results.
6.Improves scalability:
No human team can scale its scope to match an army of automated bots when it comes to competitive activities. RPA bots are capable of incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence which offers tremendous scalability over humans.
7.Ensures better security:
Humans are more prone to errors. We can make mistakes like not logging out of the system or forget to make a log entry. however, RPA tools will never forget to do these tasks and it can also be set to ‘time out’ so that the system is inaccessible when it should be. Not only this, all the activities of the RPA tools would be recorded in a file which makes it easier for investigation if any threat is found.
Robotic process automation boasts of various benefits, however there are some drawbacks which need to be considered as well. For instance,
- RPA tools depend on humans for maintaining and upgrading its configuration from time to time.
- Secondly, the holistic RPA solution must be a fundamental part of a well-structured artificial intelligence plan.
- RPA needs proper governance, well-structured design as well as careful planning.
- The most critical aspect of RPA is in the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms predictive models to increase efficiency and accuracy which are currently in the early stages of development.
Intelligent Process Automation is being introduced to overcome these shortcomings, which in layman’s terms could be described as RPA+AI. Hence, RPA has a bright future ahead with its ability to perform numerous tasks that can be automated to streamline performance.
References:
1.To know how RPA works, https://youtu.be/9URSbTOE4YI
2. Robotic process automation advantages can be studied in detail here https://www.datamation.com/artificial-intelligence/top-10-benefits-of-robotic-process-automation-rpa/
3. To know how robotic process automation in finance works, refer to https://youtu.be/vTu3JM9JUSc
4. To know more about the disadvantages of RPA, refer to https://www.rpa-star.com/rpa-2020-what-are-the-disadvantages-of-rpa/
5. To know in detail how RPA works, refer to https://youtu.be/wSfSPdOMeKE
