What is RPA? | When to use RPA?
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What is RPA?
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process automation. RPA is an application of AI technology, based on business logic and structured inputs, for automating business processes. Using RPA tools, a company can configure software, or a “robot”, to perform various processes which could involve multiple systems to perform a different task for a process. One simplest example of RPA could be download a report from the bank of last month’s transactions and send it over email, as a demand or scheduled report.
When to have RPA and when not?
RPA can be used only when the process is well defined and having the scope of automation. So if the process is not defined properly eg. if there is no standard way of storing and processing data, then you can’t automate. To automate the process first you need standardization in the process.
Is RPA a good choice as career?
Robotic Process Automation, RPA for short, is a good career choice, as more and more companies are using RPA to reap the cost savings of automation and having a shortage of this skill in the industry as it’s a comparatively new technology with wide scope grow. This has led to RPA salaries increasing more than in other IT fields, it’s currently a hot skill in the market.
What are the benefits of RPA?
There are various advantages of RPA as below.
- Increase productivity: As RPA can off-load some of the tasks performed by employees, it gives them enough time to be more productive. Also, using RPA tasks can be done faster than manually, without manual interventions.
- Increase Efficiency:
- Enhance Accuracy: As a human, we tend to do a mistake sometimes, it very normal for us but not for the “robots” whom we are deploying to do the task. They are supposed to do what we have given them to do. So they are more accurate than humans, most of the time. If the task is critical, may require manual intervention, like approval.
- Increase Security: It will increase security by allowing access only by allowed roles and users. As it’s automated manually data can’t be tampered or stolen.
- Scalability: As it doesn’t need manual intervention and processes are generally executed on servers, so it very much possible to do the scaling of automation.
- Decrease response-time: Timely deliverability is very critical for every business, When RPA is deployed it can be immediately available for the required task 24×7. Even RPA tools provide process scheduling as well, like every Monday generate this report and mail to business users.
- Data generation and analytics: Using RPA we should be able to control and standardized the data generated by processes, which will be easy to perform analytics.
Best RPA tools available in the industry?
According to Gartner, these are the top RPA tools or softwares.
- UiPath
- AutomationAnywhere
- BluePrism
- Pega