Imagine an eCommerce trying to gain market share by offering “attractive” pricing for products in some category. To make sure prices are competitive, someone needs to visit multiple competitor’s web stores to compare pricing to similar products. Once collected, competitor’s prices could go into an Excel spreadsheet, sent to the sales team, and used to adjust the price customers (and the mighty Google) see on their web site.
What we described above is a relatively simple business process. The “P,” in RPA, requires gathering data from multiple web sites, compiling and emailing a spreadsheet. This process is relatively simple if you have only a few products to compare but gets increasingly more tedious as the number of products and competitors grow.
This is where the “R” comes into play. Similar to mechanical robots, RPA solutions use software “bots” that can be instructed to do repetitive tasks on behalf of a person. Bots can be installed on any computer and launch applications, simulate keyboard entries, clicks of a mouse, as well as reading the content that applications display on a screen. To handle the sample case above, an RPA tool will start a software “bot” and instruct it to open a web browser, navigate to a competitor website, find a specific product and “read” the price the site is displaying. This bot will then open Excel, create a new file (e.g. with todays’ date) and enter the price into a specific cell. At the end of the process the bot will save the Excel file and e-Mail it to the product team. If you want to see RPA sample in action, here is a short video of an RPA bot creating a Sales Order in SAP.
The sample competitive research process we used above is just one example of a business process. In any organization there are hundreds of processes across HR, Procurement, Warehousing, etc. Many of these processes can span across multiple software systems and usually involve repetitive tasks moving metrics to and from spreadsheets.
The real power of modern RPA tools is to provide a comprehensive solution that makes it easy to build, manage, schedule and automate multiple bots that can perform different tasks in a predictable and controlled way, all at the same time. RPA tools provide the infrastructure that controls how many bots to deploy on which machines and for which tasks. They also provide a way to monitor the results of bot’s work and report any errors that may be encountered (for example if a product has disappeared from a competitor’s site in our example above). Good RPA tools make programing bots relatively simple so this process can be easily extended to automate tasks across any enterprise system (like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce etc.)
Using RPA tools, companies can leverage RPA technology by automating simple but tedious tasks. This results in increased productivity as well as accuracy (as the human element is eliminated), and completing more work with the same number of people.
When building solutions using RPA, our CNBS Software RPA architects, have identified a repeatable 4 phase pattern. In our experience, RPA projects that follow this pattern tend to provide the most value to the business process they try to automate.
RPA is one of the fastest-growing technologies in the tech industry.
The biggest name in RPA is UIPath. They were No.1 in Delloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500. In 2019, the company closed its Series D funding round of $568 million, valuing the organization at $7 billion. UIPath has been continuously innovating through new features, integrations and acquisitions to make it more powerful and user friendly.
At CNBS we have been looking into the following RPA tools:
UIPath: We have been using UIPath and found it is filled with amazing features and really easy to learn. It is easy to set up and has strong support from the developer community, providing free courses for anyone to learn via UIPath Academy. We used UIPath for data scraping and found it to be very impressive.
SAP RPA: Although the setup of this tool can be a bit confusing, its seamless integration with our SAP platform has been remarkable. SAP RPA offers a free trial on SAP Cloud Platform. It worked really well with SAP GUI and was able to work through multiple screens without any issues.
Power Automate: Microsoft’s tool for RPA is an exciting entry in this space. It provides out of the box integration with multiple software packages and is easy to configure. It’s ability to share flows as templates is very impressive. We used Power Automate to create templates for the organization, automating specific tasks that individuals can modify according to their requirements.
RPA is a powerful tool that can increase workforce productivity for many business scenarios. This can have a direct positive growth effect for the business. RPA tools are not designed to be a replacement for human workers, but rather as a tool to make your employees more productive, as they can execute tedious and repetitive tasks with precision thus minimizing errors. The RPA space has been growing exponentially in recent years, and many companies are starting to gain competitive advantage by adopting this technology.