Have you ever felt trapped in your tasks? You’re into a never-ending circle where as soon as you finish daily tasks you have to start all over with them. Those repetitive but also necessary activities have taken most daily time.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that develops robots. These robots are able to emulate some human interactions with different digital systems. And so can help with those routinary activities.
But how is it if robots are those big and heavy machines? well, here we talk about the informatics concept of software robots. They can do things like login into applications, extract information and report it. Additionally, it could be faster and has fewer errors completing the tasks.
How could it help?
When people think about automation usually appears an image of machines replacing humans. But nothing could be more unrealistic. The key concept of automation is to help. This rules-based technology will take and complete all those ‘boring’ and high-volume activities.
So, the less you have to stay on these tasks the more time you have. It gives people the time to use their intelligence and creativity to improve their skills and feel comfortable in their work.
Having robotic automation on the right processes could increase productivity and creativity and reduce mental stress. Now we will see a few tips to recognize those processes.
When to use it?
Something to keep in mind with RPA is not all processes can be automated. And some can be but are not useful. So, how do we know where it is useful? According to diverse authors, there are some important aspects to be considered:
- It is a rule-based process (It follows a well-defined number of steps)
- It repeats at regular intervals (once a month, every day) or has a defined trigger (every time an email arrives)
- It has defined inputs and outputs (defined sources)
- The RPA solutions will be a long-term solution (It will be executed several times)
And also, is important to identify if the original process needs a redesign. Because a human process with faults could also have an erroneous automation solution.
Some uses
In recent months, Equinox AI Lab has implemented this technology with clients such as Bayer and in marketing and human recourses processes. This has had an impact on reducing the time they spend looking for new opportunities or candidates. The automation gets and organizes the information from different sites and saves the filtered information. So, they have punctual information to check and save time.
Final thoughts and a step forward
As you may notice RPA is not necessary AI, it takes human process actions and completes them. But there is the concept of intelligent automation. This combines the best of both. RPA actions and AI processing information, thinking.
This gets a new vision of having characters or speech recognition and manages unstructured data. With this in mind, future use of RPA with AI could include read emails and give a specific answer related to the client petition. Or it is necessary to pass this information to a person who could give a better response.
In conclusion, RPA is a useful tool to reduce the time we spend in repetitive jobs with defined rules that can be modeled. Not all processes could be automated but the ones which can be, have a great impact on people’s lives and industry productivity.
REFERENCES
Blueprims. (s.f.). RPA AND INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: A GLOSSARY. Obtenido de https://www.blueprism.com/resources/white-papers/what-is-rpa-what-is-intelligent-automation-heres-a-glossary-of-automation-terminology/
Casey, K. (30 de July de 2020). How to explain Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in plain English. Obtenido de https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2019/5/rpa-robotic-process-automation-how-explain
Marchuk, M. (18 de February de 2021). ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre la RPA, la automatización inteligente y la hiperautomatización? Obtenido de https://www.blueprism.com/es/resources/blog/whats-the-difference-between-rpa-intelligent-automation-and-hyperautomation/
UiPath. (s.f.). What is Robotic Process Automation – RPA Software. Obtenido de https://www.uipath.com/rpa/robotic-process-automation
Diana Perez – RPA Engineer
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