Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a practice that a lot of companies adopt within their organisation, especially in the Shared Service Environment (SSE). Companies like KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and others help companies and organisations to deploy Robots that take over mundane and manual repetitive tasks. In the video below is an example of an automation process for a standardized invoice process. It repeats the steps what a human would do to finish the invoicing process in real life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW95yb6J1eU
The Robot Software which is used for the demonstration is BluePrism, other RPA vendors are for example UiPath and AutomationAnywhere. What the software basically does, is to go over a set of configured workflows and performs the respective specified actions set out in the workflow to complete the transaction.
RPA can only work with organized and standardized data within predefined business processes, which makes automating less complex tasks very feasible. Moreover, it is also tracking every step of the transaction which in the end creates an enormous database. The payoffs however, are sometimes marginal or just enough for companies to be able to shift their headcounts around, due to its implementation costs. But this does not mean it cannot pay out in the long-term.
If RPA is combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) the capability of RPA can be extrapolated into tackling more complex tasks or business processes that can prove much more profitable as technology evolves.
The future of RPA depends on advancement in other technologies to become a real threat for us on the job market, as we would then have to compete against intelligent robots. However, even with the advancement in AI or ML it does not necessarily need to be the situation that we get substituted. Instead it can also be the case that we will have powerful tools at our disposal that can help us to achieve even greater productivity and performance than ever before.
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