We hear a lot how automation will change the world and how
it will satisfy the needs of manual workforce to build and deploy new processes
on need and day to day basis? Whether it is small or big organization all are
aiming at automated business processes in way to complement the manual strategizing
and also the process remain uninterrupted.
RPA or Robotic Process Automation is a new age technological
marvel that are utilizing by enterprises to automate day to day manual task and
process. The manual task including data extraction, invoice processing,
processing portal queries and prices, maintaining customer data, validating files
and many more. Now processing these tasks manually may be quite complex and the
solution to this problem is Robotic Process Automation.
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| Algorithm for RPA |
Now let understand what is RPA?
Consider a situation where you want to publish your article
on various social groups/platforms at a specific time every day. Would you wish
to do this manually every day for each and every article? Well this will cost
to you and it will make you tiresome, instead you can make a robot which will
publish article for you every day at any time at your will. Just configure
computer/software or a robot to interpret human actions and immediate them. So here
you configured a robot which will publish the article every day at specific
time and this lead to decrease in cost and saves time.
So RPA or Robotic Process Automation is process of
automating the task or processes with the help of robots and software to reduce
human interventions. Now this bots can either just follows rules defined by the
users or can use machine learning capabilities to suggest user with
recommendations and generate meaningful results. RPA can also be used to
automate humongous amount of tasks as human resources, financial services,
health care, supply chain management, customer services, accounting, etc. Each
industry can use RPA in their way to reduce the manual workforce and work with
a better efficiency so as to ensure intelligence of manual workforce is used to
benefit organization.
How do you think RPA is applied in the industries as in world of RPA physical robots don’t work?
RPA is applied in industries using enormous amount of tools
it has on day to day basis the most popular tools are blue prism, UI path and
automation anywhere. These tools prospect in market because of user interface,
vendor experience, maintenance and support and so on, any RPA tool that you
choose must perform three functionalities.
The tool should be able to interact with various systems
either through screen scrapping/API integrations. The tool should be able to make decisions and determine its
action based on inputs gathered from other systems. The tool should have interface to program the bot.
How does RPA work?
Consider a scenario where you have read a number of invoices
and extract the data from those invoices to store the data into the specific
cells of a excel file. How do you think you can start automating these tasks? Well
first step is to locate all the invoices to single folder so that the bots
designed can easily access it. Then you can define the actions for the bot to
read the files from the folder one after the other until all the files are
ready. Now once the bot starts opening the file it has to extract specific data
values and store it into a excel file, to do that you have to next design the
step to extract the data value or identify the field from which you want to
store the data either by dragging mouse over the area or by mentioning the
variable then you have to mention the relative area that is the area next to
the field from which you wish to extract the data. Similarly you can repeat the
actions until all the fields designed to extract. Till now we have designed
automation to only extract data but we haven’t defined the rules to store the
data into specific cells, to start this you can mention the starting cell name
and iterate the loop to extract the next extract value of same invoice in same
row but in the next column. Once all the data has been stored in a single file
you have to define the rules for your bots in such a way that it iterates the
next files also, to do that you can just find the rule to go one cell below and
to the beginning of the row of active cell. Then you have to repeat the action
of extracted data and storing the values in excel sheet this will store the
values of all the fields in designated excel sheet and that’s how you can
design the process of automation but the life cycle of RPA doesn’t end here! Once
the business requirements are analyzed a bot is developed to automate a specific
task then next step that comes into picture is running the testing cycle to analyze
the quality and correct defect in the automation workforce simultaneously. After
developing and testing phases the bot enters in maintenance phase in which it
provides continuous supports and help in immediate defect resolution. This is
how RPA works and how a single and complex work can be automated.
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| RPA |
Benefits of RPA
1. Accuracy – it means automated process is less error prone,
high uniformity, high precision.
2. Consistency – all the tasks are performed in same manner. It
also reduces the manual workforce and hence reduces the cost used to perform
any task.
3. High productivity rate – execution time is faster
4. No/less coding required – not much coding skills required
5. RPA not only improves the timelines but it also improves the
quality of resources.
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