Explaining Robotic Process Automation to a 6-year old
This article gives insights to RPA Automation in the simplest words possible that even your 6-year old cousin can understand and remember.🤠
Introduction 🧠
During business uncertainty, you want to get the most out of every opportunity. Robotic process automation (RPA) is designed to handle those repetitive, routine, dreary, and uninteresting tasks found inside most business processes. Keeping those going enables you to process information 24 hours a day, seven days a week without people intervention.
With RPA, employees can focus on higher-level tasks requiring reasoning and customer interaction. Increase your productivity, build more efficient operations, and a better experience for employees and customers.
Robotic Process Automation has 3 terms in it and here we have each term explained:
Robotic: An entity which has the capability to mimic the human actions.
Process: A sequence of steps, that lead to meaningful activity or task is known as a process.
Automation: Tasks happen automatically i.e. without human intervention.
What is RPA? 🙄
The process of automating business operations with the help of robots to reduce human intervention is said to be a Robotic Process Intervention or simply RPA.
Phases of RPA 🔤
RPA is implemented in 4 phases:
- Planning
- Development
- Testing
- Support and Maintenance
RPA is not about creating a humanoid robot nor it is there to replace humans.
How do RPA works? ⛑️
This question might be bothering you whether physical robots are used or actual automation tools are used for doing the task. RPA actually consists of a few software available in the market which let you configure automation and work close to automate your business operations. RPA robots are capable of mimicking many–if not all–human user actions. They log into applications, move files and folders, copy and paste data, fill in forms, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, scrape browsers, and more.
Some real-life examples️??
Let's take an example. Suppose we want to automate “movie search” using a Robot. Let's take a scenario in which a person wants to search for a particular movie he wants to watch. He searches on multiple websites but could not find his movie. After multiple failed attempts, he gets disappointed. He realizes that he wasted a lot of time searching for a movie. Now he decides to use the power of RPA.
He creates a Robot that searches all the major websites for the given movie. Here, the term ‘robot’ is not actually a physical machine or what you see in movies. It’s actually a software that runs on a virtual or a physical machine.
So after the task of searching the movie is performed by the robot, after few hours he gets the notification that the movie is found.
There are 6 major steps that the bot has performed:
- Open website.
- Search for a movie.
- Find the results.
- Save the results.
- Repeat the same with other websites.
- Lastly, the most important step i.e. to send the collated message to the user.
In this way, RPA bots are capable of mimicking most human-computer interactions to carry out a ton of error-free tasks at high volume and speed. Now, in this automated process, the work is reduced for the human and saves time and energy both by using RPA robots.
Let's take another example. Think of copy-paste tasks and moving files from one location to another. To perform these tasks in bulk with a high speed, RPA bots are your perfect friend.
RPA Tools ⛏️
RPA is implemented through software. These can be considered as RPA tools.
Here are some top tools in the RPA market that help you to automate tasks easily.
- UiPath
- Blue Prism
- Automation anywhere
These 3 tools are most widely used in the automation industry for various purposes.
RPA Benefits 🖼️
Accuracy
- Less error-prone
- High uniformity
- High precision
Consistency — All repetitive tasks are performed with the same accuracy and speed
- Reduced cost of process execution
- Increased productivity
- Improved output accuracy
- Easier scaling
How is RPA different from other enterprise automation tools? 💫
In contrast to other, traditional IT solutions, RPA allows organizations to automate at a fraction of the cost and time previously encountered. RPA is also non-intrusive in nature and leverages the existing infrastructure without causing disruption to underlying systems, which would be difficult and costly to replace. With RPA, cost efficiency and compliance are no longer an operating cost but a byproduct of the automation.
Myths that exist about RPA 🇧🇱
Myth 1: Coding is required to use RPA software.
That’s not true at all. To use RPA and implement it, one needs to understand how its tools and the software work on the front-end. So even if a non-technical person wants to create an RPA Robot, he can easily do it given he has a basic knowledge of software and their front-end.
Myth 2: RPA Software does not require human supervision.
This is a complete illusion because humans are needed to program the RPA bots, feed them tasks for automation, and manage them. So, humans are not replaced by robots in either way.
Myth 3: Only large big companies can afford to deploy RPA.
Even small to medium-sized companies and organizations can deploy RPA and automate their businesses.
Applications of RPA 🎡
Multinational companies like Deloitte, Accenture, and much more use RPA in their day-to-day tasks.
So, these are the various sectors where RPA is used.
- Customer service
- Human Resource
- Accounting
- Financial services
- Supply chain management
- Healthcare
RPA is a technology that’ll make your work easy and is quite reliable to use. It’s something worth investing in as an organization.
What are the pitfalls of RPA? 🤖
RPA isn’t for every enterprise. As with any automation technology, RPA has the potential to eliminate jobs, which presents CIOs with challenges managing talent. While enterprises embracing RPA are attempting to transition many workers to new jobs, Forrester Research estimates that RPA software will threaten the livelihood of 230 million or more knowledge workers or approximately 9 percent of the global workforce.
Even if CIOs navigate the human capital conundrum, RPA implementations fail more often than not. “Several robotics programs have been put on hold, or CIOs have flatly refused to install new bots,” Alex Edlich and Vik Sohoni, senior partners at McKinsey & Company, said in a May 2017 report.
Installing thousands of bots has taken a lot longer and is more complex and costly than most organizations have hoped it would be, Edlich and Sohoni say. The platforms on which bots interact often change, and the necessary flexibility isn’t always configured into the bot. Moreover, a new regulation requiring minor changes to an application form could throw off months of work in the back office on a bot that’s nearing completion.
Closing and Summary 🌤️
- Robotic Process Automation allows organizations to automate task just like a human being was doing them across applications and systems.
- The main goal of RPA is to replace repetitive and boring clerical tasks performed by humans, with a virtual workforce.
- More CIOS are turning to robotic process automation to eliminate tedious tasks, freeing corporate workers to focus on higher-value work. But RPA requires proper design, planning, and governance if it’s to bolster the business, experts say.
- RPA is used in a wide range of industries like Healthcare, Insurance, Banking, IT, etc.
Call-to-Action 📕
These are the lead-generating piece of content or to a sales-focused landing page for a demo or consultation.
You can go through them to enhance your knowledge about RPA and venture further into the world of Automation.
What is Robotic Process Automation — RPA Software | UiPath
Robotic Process Automation | Avanade
Top Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Company | RPA Solutions
Finally, I leave you on a note to think whether robots and automated tools will eventually replace humans by the next 10 years and increase unemployment or prove as a boon to us as they’re now in the COVID-19 situation.
