Automation is a familiar part of the tool of process excellence and continuous improvement, which has been used for years, if not decades. So, how is robotic process automation (RPA) different?
First of all, RPA is very independent of the system, which for me is one of the main differentiators of the automation of yesteryear. In general, there were two types of automation:
Screen capture / scraping: these tools could be programmed to capture specific information in web forms and place them in fields and / or use coordinates on the screen and give instructions on where to place the mouse pointer to perform a “click”. Of course, this works very well until the screen or the pop-up boxes change their location.
Product-specific workflows: Many products, especially some of the largest ERP vendors, include workflow tools with their software. These were excellent for scheduling specific tasks and / or triggering actions such as alerts or emails. However, they were not entirely agnostic of the system and were complicated to use.
RPA in many aspects is both of the above, but in the next iteration. With this, I want to say that, although, for example, it resembles screen captures / screen analysis and workflows, it is more advanced than this: RPA is the natural evolution of these two approaches. The current RPA platforms are such that they are scalable for the company. The processes are constructed by showing the robots what to do step by step instead of coding or scripting them, in exactly the same way a human being would use the end user’s systems.
This means that the RPA tools are not harmful and that IT considers them to be low risk. The tools also really “recognize” the fields or pop-up screens they are working with, instead of depending on a location on the screen. The software robots used in RPA “read” the applications using API or the operating system itself. It is part of the training of the robot where it shows how to read the different screens with which it must work.
As a result, the current RPA tools are commercial tools for non-technical users. In the past, this was not the case with many of the older automation tools that were tailored to a specific product, could not be easily deployed on a large scale and required specialized technical resources to configure and maintain them.
RPA is now a relatively agile tool, low complexity and low cost in the tool kit of process engineers.
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