1 Introduction
The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market continues to gain momentum as businesses seek to boost digital transformation, productivity, and the speed and efficiency of business processes to improve customer experiences and reduce costs in an increasingly competitive global market.
RPA is a type of automation technology with the potential to transform the way businesses operate by automating manual tasks within business processes. RPA uses pieces of software capable of completing complex repeated processes typically performed by a human. These pieces of software are commonly called “software robots”.
RPA typically mimics the tasks performed by humans, but a digital workforce of software robots can also support and augment business processes and human workers as well as manage processes across multiple departments, locations, and systems, on premise and in the cloud.
The biggest benefit of software robots is that they are not prone to human error, can easily scale to workloads, and can work 24x7x365.
By replacing humans for high-volume IT and business processes, RPA is not only about improving efficiency and productivity, cutting costs and reducing headcount, but it is also about freeing up employees for more strategic and rewarding tasks, and is ultimately about enabling organizations to grow and remain competitive or even gain a competitive advantage.
The initial wave of RPA technologies focused on automating manual, repetitive tasks such as data entry using screen scraping. But RPA is increasingly using AI (mainly in the form of machine learning) for augmenting and replacing human decision making, and for understanding text and other information to enable more complex and enterprise-wide applications.
RPA comes into play when manual tasks cannot be fully automated by coding logic and interfacing with the various systems involved. This is either due to a lack of APIs or because the tasks involve not only logic that can be easily programmed, but also require human understanding, problem solving, and decision making. RPA provides a means of automating manual or repetitive human tasks at the GUI level where there are no adequate APIs, which is typically the case where legacy systems are involved, or where there is a need to replace or augment human skills with automation.
What distinguishes RPA from traditional IT automation, is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and exceptions, and its ability to integrate workflows across an entire enterprise. This approach enables companies to integrate siloed operations, applications, and data; build internal capabilities to adapt and scale; and create business value and competitive advantages.
RPA robots may either be attended or unattended. Attended robots typically automate 20% to 90% of tasks and work in tandem with humans in front office/customer-facing applications. Unattended robots on the other hand are typically found in back office applications and automate 100% of tasks such as file transfers, generating reports, or monitoring systems.
RPA can be used for simple automation on a single user’s desktop or to build a vast digital workforce that spans the enterprise by automating the tasks shared by many people in an organization, thereby increasing the efficiency and productivity of potentially thousands of employees.
RPA is becoming a priority topic for many businesses, promising business process optimization, cost reduction, and a means of driving digital transformation by automating integration between existing systems, applications, and workflows under a central automation platform without expensive hardware changes or development.
Datamatics is a provider of consulting, information technology, data management, and business process management services. Its service portfolio makes extensive use of software robots, machine learing, and other artificial intelligence technologies. Headquartered in Mumbai, India the company has a presence in the USA, Australia, Asia and Europe. Technology partners include AWS, Citrix, and CyberArk.
