Idea to improve your work productivity using automation! (No coding)
Story of Work Automation and Value addition in any function
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you have special powers at work that will boost your productivity and make your work at life feel comfortable? What would you feel if you are able to complete work that was allotted to you for 4 hours could be accomplished within 2 hours ?
This was the question that was running all over my mind ever since I joined to work for the company. With the amount of work that is being dished out for people, especially for the tech savvy beginners, there would high intention to automate the lesser meaningful task. I knew the first answer that would pop-up to my mind was coding task automation.For starters, task automation is the part where a software is being used to handle repetitive task in order for humans to concentrate on high complexity task. However, I am from a non coding stream right from high school days and college days. Hence, it would be difficult for me to grasp suddenly about the coding part. The major drawback with the coding part is that they can only emulate codes under static conditions.
Robotic Process Automation
Enter the RPA — Robotic Process Automation. This is a technology that is used to automate repetitive tasks that seeks human intervention and business logics to perform actions. This is not to be confused with BPA — Business Process Automation. BPA is a workflow automation tool that is being used for end to end business automation purpose. While RPA focuses on one task / one department (if necessary), the BPA cannot focus on a single task. RPA words have meaning in their individual words on what it stands for. Robotic — mimics the human actions, Process — A step by step sequence of action & Automation — No human intervention.
Let me give you a small example to understand the RPA role in the modern world. Imagine if your daily task is to go into a particular website to scrap a data and paste on the excel and monitor the trends for last n number of days. This is a perfect example of a task that can be automated easily using a RPA. If you can layout the above mentioned task as a process flow and provide a logic to that and connect it as a process, the resulting recipe would be the RPA. Regular automation usually requires a new software to automate the specific task, here the RPA is sort of an enhancer for the same task as they just mimic actions.
Components of RPA
The architecture of the RPA usually includes a basic of three components — Design studio (Client), Orchestrator (server) and Robots. Design studio is the place where we would design our process flow or flows based on the activities and logics. The Orchestrator is the one which co-ordinates and maintains the workflow execution system. Robots are of two types — unattended and attended bots. Unattended bots are bots which automates back-office processes at scale and they also work independently. Attended bots are employees triggered bots which works for interaction.
Implementation of RPA
There are few phases which are to be done in-order to get implementation of RPA done. Initial phases include discovery phase, Solution design phase, development phase, user testing phase, deployment phase and execution phase.
Discovery phase includes the discovery of the potential activities and tasks which can be automated. Solution design phase is where you design solution for tasks in a step-wise manner and relevant documents are to be made for next stages. Development phase is one where automated bots are to be developed based on scripts. User testing phase is for pre production phase where the bots are tested for their performance. If they are satisfactory, then they move towards the deployment phase or else back to the development phase. The deployment phase is for the production environment. Execution is where we can trigger execution.
Pros and Cons of RPA
The major benefit of implementing an RPA include that one doesn’t need to change the underlying IT systems that are in place already. Efficiency and high accuracy are also benefits of the implementing an RPA systems. The indirect benefit is that employee satisfaction will see a good rise. This is owing to the fact that employees need not burden themselves with low level energy sapping tasks anymore. Coding is also not required for the workflow preparation since its only an activity based one. The cons include the RPA implementation cost which is high initially and will be costly in the short-term assessment. Magnifying error is also another big issue with RPA if the process flow is not foul proof as the robots cannot find some errors which are obvious to humans.
Conclusion
There are few RPA software which are being used by the top companies to improve their productivity. UiPath , Blue prism and Automation anywhere are such softwares. Each of these software are different in-terms of working, however, the underlying principle remains the same. If anyone wishes to learn the RPA and wants to improve their office condition, UiPath Community Edition software and Automation anywhere community edition can be used for learning. Happy learning Folks !
