By: Adrián Anacleto
The willingness to automate repetitive and boring tasks that also have a strong tendency for human errors to be made during their execution is not a new thing. It began at the end of the 1960s, with the first sensors capable of regulating the temperature of an environment. Thirty years later, the BPM (Business Process Modeling, which is a set of tools that allows the modeling, optimization and automation of some business processes based on the structuring of rules, behaviors and company standards) universe was consolidated. This way, it created an organized workflow that integrates users, systems and data.
The concept of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) could be understood as the natural evolution of BPM, as it allows replicating 100% of repetitive daily activities from beginning to end. Its appliance is ideal to replace some of the typical issues in companies: Administrative processes, billing and payment, conciliation, loading of receipts or tickets, etc. RPA learns and executes administrative tasks and is able to follow a step-by-step sequence, be trained and interact with external systems to exchange information. However, unlike artificial intelligence, it doesn’t make decisions based on business logic. In addition, it doesn’t generate changes in the underlying technological infrastructure either, as it can work with any platform placed in front of it, just as a human would.
Therefore, everything that historically took up huge amounts of time can now be diverted to a software capable of, among other functions, combining two spreadsheets, obtaining external data from a website, verifying the validity of a bill, loading the data into the ERP or some other system that is indicated, or preparing reports. The tool’s robotic capabilities range from the ability to optically recognize letters in any document (including handwritten ones), to listening to voice calls and interpreting their content, differentiating accents and idioms.
A company that needs to process ten million tickets a day to produce a single accounting entry finds in RPA the perfect ally to exponentially grow the potential of its workforce. The robot is dedicated to solve repetitive activities 24 hours a day, seven days a week while the people, who were previously dedicated to that, can become agents of added value and take care of activities that range from fraud detection to sales process performance analysis, as well as an infinite number of possibilities according to the specific needs of the business.
The adoption of RPA implies a revolution in the working way, the execution of processes and the delivery of results. Companies that decide to explore the possibilities of this technology need to undergo a cultural change first, with strong change management support.
However, technology doesn’t stop there: The ease of integration with machine learning allows us to predict the next generation of RPA with increased intelligence, capable of making simple decisions in the face of disjunctions or conditional situations. In addition, as technology develops, more and more pre-built models are being used to cover the most diverse processes, so their implementation and operation will tend to be increasingly simple and their large-scale corporate deployment is expected in the next five years. Just as there are data or document warehouses today, it is to be expected that soon there will be bot warehouses that will cover all the needs of activating repetitive processes that the company or any of its employees in particular may have.
In conclusion, RPA is a solution that cannot be ignored by smart companies, particularly to those that devote all of their resources to value-added activities and making their businesses grow. The best way to get started in this transformation process is well accompanied. We are looking forward to hearing from you at info@epidata.net to begin discovering the benefits that RPA can bring to your company.
