Hey everyone. Today, let's talk about RPA, or Robotic Process Automation.
In my opinion, the definition lies more in the terms process automation
and less than actual robots. But RPA is changing the software world much like physical robots have
changed the world that we live in every day. For example, take a vending machine,
there's not a person standing there sorting all your money and bending the goods it's
automated because it's a tedious task. Now RPA is doing the same thing in the software world
for tedious repetitive tasks. But for things like IT, or even Business Process Management,
RPA is not going to help and that's because these require more specialized skills.
So where can RPA assist? Well let's start with an example inspired by one of my favorite TV shows.
Let's say we've got a disgruntled employee, we're going to call him Pete. Now Pete has
to take a number of documents that are stored you know digitally and then convert them into
forms that he then has to file. So this is a very tedious task so he has to take all of these forms,
write them out manually, and then finally actually go and file them.
So this process let's see has to do this you know 10,000 times. That means, you know Pete's going
to be pretty unhappy about this because this is a very tedious repetitive task it's something that
you know with RPA he could actually automate. So, let's see what Pete would do if he wanted to set
up an automation to do this flow. So the first thing he has to do is identify what's the data,
where is it coming from. So in this particular example the data is already in
a computer somewhere and let's say that's coming in through email, or maybe his co-worker Kelly
is manually inputting them from you know phone calls with customers. So they take the customer
forms they they put them into the computer. Now Pete has to extract data, right. So that's going
to be the first thing that RPA can help with. Now, so with OCR, or Optical Character Recognition,
along with the data that's in the computer Pete's able to pull out data and what he's going to do
is actually extract that data for further processing. So that data can be things like
the customer's name and the info, let's say in the customer form it's the complaints that
make up that information. So taking that data so the next thing Pete's going to do is let's
say validate it so make sure that none of the data is corrupt and you know all the data looks good.
Finally he has to input it into a digital form. So he puts it into a digital form
and finally he sends it off to a printer. Now at this phase all Pete really has to do is take the
final forms that are printed out and then file them and that's going to be a whole lot easier
to do than doing this manually for all 10,000 customer complaint forms that are coming in.
So that's where RPA can really assist with tedious repetitive tasks that require things like clicking
through user interfaces, copying and pasting data, or kind of other things like Optical Character
Recognition where you have to extract data. So, when choosing an RPA solution which is going to
enable you to do this type of automation, I'd say there's four major things that you really need to
be looking for. Now the first one I'm going to start with you want to make sure that your RPA
tool is intelligent. Now in this particular flow, Pete used a lot of capabilities so he used OCR,
Optical Character Recognition, in addition he used different data manipulation techniques.
So this enables Pete to do things like extract, input data, validate it,
and finally he even had a function to be able to print something out create a physical piece
of paper from a software-based automation. That's just scratching the tip of what Robot
RPA can do today. So, another thing RPA can do is things like AI or machine learning to
train a model to recognize not just you know simple characters, but maybe even images. So,
that's something that Pete might want to augment this automation with in the future.
So, that's one thing you want to make sure is that your RPA tool is intelligent.
Number two, low code. So, RPA is really only going to be effective if the users that are creating
these automation find that process to be easy, otherwise management might choose to actually just
have their employees do it manually if creating this type of automation was too time consuming.
So, a low code RPA environment is going to enable Pete to do things like drag and drop
components and have minimal touch to actually get this automation created end to end.
Number three, concurrency. So this is going to be the ability to run multiple robots at
the same time, multiple automation tasks. So, for the 10,000 customer complaint forms,
say this task takes 15 seconds, that's a lot of time. So, imagine if you could launch multiple
robots and divvy up that work well you could get through the task at hand much more quickly. So an
RPA solution should have concurrency support. And the last one I want to mention here is RPA as a
Service. Now an "as a Service" model is going to come with a number of advantages. For one,
it's going to give you shorter time to value and that's because Pete doesn't have to worry about
spinning up his own infrastructure, installing the software, managing that environment, he can
just log in and start building these automations right away. That brings me to my next point,
currency, so not concurrency, but currency, which is keeping up with the latest versions that are
available. So RPA and the world of RPA is changing quite rapidly and so with some of the intelligent
capabilities enabled within RPA, say a new version of OCR comes out and he wants to use it,
well with an RPA as a Service capability you can get updates more quickly, you're more
current with the latest versions of software. So you get to use those latest components and
maybe OCR 2.0 kind of helps fix some of the bugs with pulling data from customer complaint forms.
Finally, I think the last one that I want to mention here is that it allows you to collaborate.
So imagine that Pete builds this automation, publishes it, and then now wants to share it with
the the Nashua branch of this company so that they can take advantage of the same process
to automate this flow and kind of file customer complaint forms. So "as a Service" environments
generally are multi-tenant and enable you to collaborate with your co-workers.
So, this was a quick overview of RPA. RPA tools are quickly growing in popularity,
and so is the scope of what RPA is able to actually automate. Now if you like this video,
have any questions or comments, be sure to drop a like or a comment below. As always,
stay tuned and subscribe for more videos like this in the future. Thank you. RPA is growing
very rapidly and the scope of what RPA is able to automate is also growing rapidly. Now if you want
to see what IBM is doing in the RPA space be sure to check out the links in the description below.