How robotic process automation is getting smarter as it evolves

RPA began with a simple premise – to automate labour-intensive, clerical tasks. “RPA started out by mimicking computer users’ desktop activities, such as mouse clicks and keystrokes,” says Bernhard Schaffrik, a principal analyst at Forrester. “It has gone beyond simple mimicking, and is now focused on automating what computer users usually do manually.”

CIOs typically turn to RPA as an alternative to, or part of, business process automation (BPA), which relies on connections between applications. Where these connections are not possible, or are too expensive to create, RPA is an alternative to human data entry.

“The primary problem businesses are trying to solve when they invest in automation and AI is that they’re collecting data far faster than they can analyse it,” says Chris Huff, chief strategy officer at Kofax.

“Certain business processes within the ‘pool of data’ are more fit for automation than others. Primarily, business processes that include structured and standardised data and are driven by rules-based processes operating in a stable environment are the strongest candidates for RPA.”

RPA can also team up with optical character recognition or even speech-to-text systems to recognise data in scans or audio files, and use that data to move on to the next step. Used this way, RPA can speed up business processes or shorten time to market.

And, as a computer-based system, it is less prone to errors than human operators are.

“RPA has a lower error rate than a comparable human,” says Sebastian Schroetel, head of intelligent RPA at software supplier SAP. “We all have a bad day sometimes, when we get to work and make errors. That is reduced with machine-based automation. They do their thing and don’t have a bad day.”

Translation services and consulting firm RWS uses RPA internally, and on client projects. “We use it for certain translation projects for customers which are quite complex, such as where documents are using content from previous projects,” says George Bara, the company’s vice-president for partnerships.

“We build an RPA system to service all those interactions or to transform data and move it within multiple systems. One of the most common use cases in corporations that are using RPA is to take processes and systems and bind them together, only relying on human interaction when there is a need.”

Internally, RWS uses RPA in invoice processing. The system can extract data from an invoice for, say, its German branch, extract the relevant information and translate it into English – without having to translate the whole document.

“It’s about productivity,” says Bara. “It’s minimising time spent on non-productive repetitive tasks. Why would I spend time doing tasks that a robot can do on my behalf? Why have 100 people reading emails from customers or have a robot push them to humans?”