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Robotic Process Automation 101
- 1. Robotic Process Automation 101 (Screen-scraping & BPA get married, and wait there’s more!) Paul O’Hagan
- 2. Executive Summary • RPA is the marriage of screen-scraping technologies with business process automation. • Marketing sprinkled AI on top because, well, AI is cool. • RPA can reducing errors and costs related to swivel-chair integration activities • The more back-office swivel-chair tasks you have, the stronger the ROI • This includes QA automation activities • For the geek, it’s: • Transactional integration without ETL; and • Application interaction with out API needed
- 3. RPA Sweet Spot • Use-Case Examples • QA automation • Data validation and/or integration between Salesforce & SAP • Form scraping from legacy mainframe application • Transaction duplication between systems Swivel chair integration tasks Thousands of common repeated tasks Tasks need to be completed quickly and predictably Sweet Spot
- 4. RPA Types • Attended – does an action when a user interacts with it, or tells it to • Front office activities such as helping answer a customer inquiry • Unattended – does an action on a batch basis with no human start • Nightly data verification between Salesforce and SAP
- 5. RPA Is… • For reducing time, costs and errors related to automating manual swivel chair integration tasks. • Able to scale to enterprise use RPA Isn’t… • Augmented intelligence assistant. You can use RPA to help make useful chatbots, but RPA is not a chatbot. • Going to solve unstructured data integration problems, but could be a platform to help
- 6. RPA – How it’s Positioned by Vendors • Save time & money by automating mundane process activities • Integrate legacy systems that don’t have an API • Built for the cubical worker to create and a developer to tune • Use AI to go from “taught automation” to “learned automation”
- 7. RPA – How it Works • Application User • Builds “bots” by recording initial task operations(s) by recording themselves working with applications • Literally operates at the application UI layer. • Developer • Augments bot recording by editing recorded tasks by adding operations such as • Data validation; Wait/delay commands • Can build routines & abstraction as necessary using robust bespoke scripting interfaces • Publishes bots using management facilities from RPA vendor
- 8. RPA – Why Customers Buy It • Automate slow and error prone “swivel chair integration tasks” • Solutions are generally enterprise ready – manage & deploy thousands of bots with failover and monitoring and security • Hope of solving ancient but still critical unstructured data integration problems
- 9. RPA & AI • The RPA AI story is about being able to: • Identify relevant unstructured data within content (invoice number) and knowing what to do with it • Generally referred to as “text analytics” For example the system finds a string of characters, in a PDF, understands it’s an account number and links the PDF to the customer record • Identify the application on the screen, the content being shown, and knowing what to do with it • Generally referred to as “image analytics or “convolutional neural network.” For example the system recognizes there’s an SAP invoicing window on the sales reps screen and pro-actively shows the customer record in Salesforce • Reality • Fear-of-missing-out has vendors talking big but reality is they are tightly controlled demos for marketing purposes • The theory is sound, the reality is fraught with the same challenges as any other AI strategy