By using software robots, Robotic process automation (RPA) frees employees and managers from repetitive and time-consuming digital tasks. Today, RPA is moving towards hyperautomation. Software robots are no longer limited to automating and executing pre-established actions: thanks to artificial intelligence, they can now automate complex tasks, process unstructured information, and even make decisions.
RPA. Three letters synonymous with productivity. Robotic process automation consists of automating as much as possible an organization's repetitive, time-consuming and non-value-added digital tasks.
To do this, software robots will reproduce the sequence of clicks or copy-pastes that an employee does manually at their workstation to collect and process information. Generally, these are simple tasks, such as filling out forms, extracting data from a table or database, performing calculations, manipulating files, folders, etc.
RPA Improves Efficiency
Thanks to RPA, the company will gain in productivity. Let's take the example of a bank. When opening a bank account, a bot ensures that all supporting documents are gathered. Another queries different databases to verify that the new customer is not prohibited from banking. The company thus gains operational efficiency while reducing the risk of human errors or non-compliance.
Automation brings other benefits. By automating its back office processes, an organization is less dependent on the presence of its employees on site and gains resilience. According to the same Gartner, the RPA market will have jumped by nearly 39 1TP3Q in 2020 to reach 1.9 billion dollars. In France, 29 %s from large companies and ETIs have already deployed this technology according to another study, published by Mazars and UiPath, the RPA market leader.
RPA was already a major trend with the health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic has only accentuated the need for companies to increasingly automate their processes. RPA is thus evolving towards hyperautomation. This term was coined by the American consulting firm Gartner, which identified it as one of the nine technological trends of 2021.
From RPA to hyperautomation
Thus, RPA is part of a broader movement of hyperautomation using different technological building blocks, the main one of which is artificial intelligence.
Upstream of the processing chain, optical character recognition (OCR) extracts relevant data from a document such as a purchase order or an invoice. RPA software robots will then reconcile this data with others while machine learning will provide a layer of artificial intelligence.
A hyperautomation solution can also use business process management (BPM) and the low code/no code approach. We then speak of Robotic desktop automation (RDA). By using application design platforms requiring little or no code, business experts automate their processes themselves. A democratization that makes sense. Finally, who knows better than operational staff which processes should be industrialized as a priority?
The spectrum of processes eligible for automation has also expanded. After starting with accounting and financial operations, RPA tackled support functions such as IT or HR. In the case of an integration process for a new employee (onboarding), bots will automatically trigger a badge request or create a profile in the company directory.
Who are the RPA specialists?
In this growing RPA niche, we find specialists like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and UiPath, the market leader. The latter was valued at around $40 billion during its IPO last April. The French Contextor was bought by SAP. Coming from the world of Business process management (BPM), players like Appian and Pega also have every legitimacy to claim a place in process automation.
The digital giants could not stay away from the phenomenon either. Google Cloud has partnered with Automation Anywhere and AWS has partnered with Blue Prism or UiPath. With Power Automate, Microsoft offers its own hyperautomation platform by combining low code, RPA and artificial intelligence building blocks.
Microsoft also offers a client version of its solution intended for business specialists who are not IT professionals. Downloadable for free, Power Automate Desktop (PAD) allows a user to automate a series of personal tasks directly from their workstation. A way to democratize RPA through practice.
For example, you can receive an email containing the list of your next appointments, automatically analyze tweets and transmit the results to a Power BI dataset, or create a task as soon as you are mentioned in an email. .
What are the impacts of RPA and hyperautomation on the business?
At an enterprise level, however, the deployment of RPA is not neutral. By tackling potentially structuring processes, a project of this type can have impacts on the organization of work and therefore on employment. While it is customary to say that robots free employees from tedious tasks, the scope of their work may be modified.
HR will therefore be involved upstream in order to assess the social impacts of automating a process and implement, where appropriate, training or even retraining actions if positions are to be eliminated by RPA. .
In terms of governance, the company must create a steering committee bringing together the IT department and business departments in order to define the objectives pursued and the associated use cases. Beyond the search for productivity gains, RPA can notably improve customer relations or streamline the employee experience.
Some large companies, mature on the subject, have industrialized the approach with dozens of robots in production. To do this, they have set up a Center of Excellence (CoE) which may have different names. An RPA factory, a cognitive factory or an automation factory brings together different profiles, robot developers and business experts.
All RPA projects go through this factory which will guarantee the quality, safety and maintenance of the robots developed. For the sake of consistency, it is generally attached to the IT department to ensure good integration with the company's information system.
