Robotic Process Automation: My Coworker Is A Robot?

How many times during the workday are you given a physical document to manually input data into a web application? How many times do you copy data from the Internet, paste into an Excel sheet, perform a few calculations or formatting, and re-enter this data into another computer system? If you’ve ever looked up from your computer and said to yourself, “there has to be a way to automate this”… you might be interested in Robotic Process Automation, or RPA.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

RPA is a form of workflow automation that records the actions of a user in an application’s GUI, then replicates those actions directly within the application with a manual or event trigger. RPA is frequently heralded as a way for businesses to automate mundane, rules-based business processes, enabling employees to refocus their energy towards higher-value work.

Upgrade to Cognitive Automation

With RPA, automation “bots” perform mundane tasks to boost efficiency for your workforce. Known as a type of “classic automation” — RPA is enhanced with machine learning algorithms to extend “Cognitive RPA”, which uses specific AI techniques to mimic human workflows — assisting humans to make decisions, complete tasks, and meet goals. The immense value of RPA is realized upon scaling intelligent, automated processes across the enterprise, enabling workforces to spend more time on critical thinking activities such as creativity, judgment and customer interaction.

Examples of RPA

One ideal use case for automation is the maker-checker process. Maker-checker, or “dual approval,” is one of the central controls of information systems for a financial services business. The maker-checker process requires two separate people to authorize a transaction — the first user (“maker”) creates a transaction request, and the second user (“checker”) validates and approves the activity. Maker-checker is important because humans are prone to errors, so important transactions require a second pair of eyes to spot inconsistencies or potential causes for suspicion. However, this process is fraught with labor intensive, repetitive tasks that involve multiple employee’s attention, workflow complexity, and several systems for data entry.

Benefits of RPA

At Apexon, we have seen organizations benefit from implementing RPA in the following ways:

• A reduction in report processing time from 10 hours to 2 hours
• The implementation of 50 bots for annual work hour savings of $240,000 per year
• 98.7% error-free data processing cycle

Leaders of RPA

Automation Anywhere is well known in the industry as a leader in enterprise-grade cognitive capabilities and analytics, providing an intuitive platform for the most powerful automation activities. Apexon has partnered with Automation Anywhere to help our clients implement RPA across their enterprise.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise

The Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform can be used to automate almost any application — be it an application operating at the user interface (UI), application program interface (API), operating system (OS), or database layers (DB). The platform is infrastructure-agnostic, or developed and deployed in a public or private cloud. RPA utilizes tools and technologies such as screen and web browser recording, OCR, application integration, and workflow automation, to navigate across user interfaces, adjust to changes in web design, build complex processes across various platforms, and intelligently capture structured and unstructured data.

Start Automating!

Though bots will take over some aspects of business as we know it, automation is an overall improvement to daily efficiency. Technology is continuously changing how we do our jobs, and process automation is one piece of that change.If you believe your business is ready to explore the benefits of RPA and how they can improve agility in your organization, contact us.