Ever since its inception, RPA has taken the automation industry by storm. And if you're in the automation industry, you can't just ignore it anymore. Today we venture out in the world of software bots. Yes, you heard me 'software bots' like any other bots out there, ease human work by automating business processes while providing the best quality work with cost optimization. Honestly, what more can an organization ask for? So, if you're new to this entire concept of automation, very well, you've landed at the right place. We'll walk you through the below line of contents in this article, which is a detailed introduction to RPA.

Why Automation?

Very genuine question. Why do we need automation when we already have dedicated software for the concerned tasks? We try getting to the answer by considering different scenarios. Consider Jacob; his everyday task is to go through different information sources, gather required data, draw conclusions out of them, and prepare a spreadsheet. After that, he sends out this spreadsheet to his manager.
Consider another one. Most of us have credit or debit cards. Also, some of us have experienced or heard of fraud when it comes to these cards. Security is the utmost concern in the banking sector. Every banking system has a fraud detection mechanism to keep fraud in check. In the case of credit cards, they might have checks like the range of usual cash withdrawal, frequency of cash withdrawal, number of incorrect pin attempts, and much more. These checks happen by keeping track of every transaction done from a particular card. In the above two different scenarios, we see one common thing—repetitive tasks. Jacob checks different data sources every day, summarizes them into something meaningful, makes a spreadsheet, and shares it with his manager. In the banking sector scenario, every transaction of the card is tracked for anomalies. Here's where automation comes to rescue. Automation reduces human work by nearly 80% with 0% errors. We'll see how it does so in the next section.

What is RPA? And How it works?

RPA stands for 'Robotic Process Automation'; it is the next wave of innovation that involves configuring software/software bots/interfaces to perform business processes, thereby reducing human intervention and delivering more efficient and error-free products. The usage of the term 'Robotic' could be misunderstood for a robot moving around replacing what humans do. RPA doesn't deal with the physical presence of robots; instead, a robot in the RPA context equals to a software. For Business processes, RPA involves configuring the software 'robot' to do tasks previously done by humans. Let's consider Jacob's job of collecting data from various sources, processing it, and later summarizing it, which is not just the case for Jacob, thousands of employees are at this task every day. An RPA software configured to collect, process, and share the data in the desired format every day, can be error-free and handle any amount of data! In this case, the dedicated human resources could be absorbed in other work areas, which requires human attention and the non-routine work that the RPA cannot process.

Evolution of RPA

The beginning days of RPA started as early as the 1960s when the term 'Machine Learning' was being explored. Machine Learning started as a scientific endeavor targeted at developing 'Artificial Intelligence,' which involved a computer doing a lot of exciting and useful things, enabling language-based tasks such as text translation and summarization. However, a computer has limitations to process natural language, which led to the development of its sub-field, 'Natural Language Processing.' Indeed, aspects of AI, ML, and NLP formed the beginnings of RPA, and further developments of these will contribute to the overall development of the Automation field.\

In traditional automation workflow tools, a developer makes a note of key areas of automation and interfaces with the backend system using APIs or scripting languages. In contrast, RPA, with the help of repetitive patterns found in human work, forms an action list to be automated and performs it directly on the Graphical User Interface (GUI).\

Moving to the early 90s, where works around automation, AI, and RPA in specific gained momentum. One such emerging concept was 'Screen Scraping'; it involves extracting data from programs, websites, and documents. And then, there were workflow automation tools that mimic human tasks that happen repetitively as a series of automation tasks. All of which paved the way for further development of RPA. In the early 2000s, it was the period when the RPA was being implemented in enterprises. However, it was still considered to be the early stages of the RPA.

The future evolution of RPA is subjected to RPA being used optimally and following a stable, mature rule sets where costs are precise, and business ethics are very well understood. With time, RPA will increasingly be able to deal with advanced judgments and decision making. We can anticipate an acceleration in the field of RPA and RPA gaining confidence in terms of automation implementation, reliability, and business delivery.

Benefits of Using RPA

Let's see what some of the benefits on using RPA are:

• No Coding Required: RPA doesn't involve coding. Yes, you don't need a software developer to implement RPA in your system. Thus RPA helps in cost reduction.
• Non Disruptive: RPA is nondisruptive. It doesn't make any changes to the existing system, without any security, policy, or data integrity compromises, the automation software just gels into your software stack.
• Reduces Human Efforts: Introducing RPA reduces routine human work, and the same resources could be used in more engaging and creative work.
• Scalable Hosting and Deployment: The RPA system provides deployment options across virtual machines, terminal services, and cloud. Cloud deployment is one of the best among all the other deployment options, which attracts most of the enterprises due to its scalability and flexibility.

Challenges in RPA Adoption

Just like any other new technology, you may face some challenges in adopting RPA into your workflow. We'll try to single them out here:

• Employment Losses: Implementing RPA reduces human effort, which could lead to potential job losses unless the employees can upskill themselves for working with RPA.
• Upskilling for Employees: The entire team of an enterprise has to be flexible enough to accept, upskill, and adapt to the new norm.

Initial Costs: RPA is still in the stage of innovation, and so it can present challenges that may result in unwanted outcomes. Therefore, it isn't easy for enterprises to decide whether they should invest in the RPA or wait until its expansion.\

• Judging Rules Set: There are a limited number of tasks that can be automated with RPA without human intervention.

Conclusion RPA is an emergent innovation technology that uses the power of AI and Machine Learning to deliver in-class work. Its future lies in 'Smart Process Automation (SPA),' which combines Machine Learning, big data, AI, and cloud technology to extract data from unstructured sources and process it contextually to form a far more intelligent and dynamic ruleset. We have different tools for offering RPA services in the market. They differ so in various aspects; we need to have a proper understanding of our requirements and what a particular tool has to offer and accordingly choose one for ourselves. We'll see the key players in the field of RPA and the services offered by them in the next article.