What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to create software robots that emulate humans actions when interacting with digital systems and software.

Just like people, software robots can do things like understand what’s on a screen, navigate through websites, typing in a search box, etc.
However, unlike humans, software robots can do it faster, more consistently and don’t get tired.

Benefits of RPA?

• Improved Accuracy:
  Unlike humans, robots don’t make mistakes. So when handing the process over to a robot, we are assured of 100% accuracy.
• Greater Productivity:
  Unlike humans, robots don’t make mistakes. So when handing the process over to a robot, we are assured of 100% accuracy.
• Improved Accuracy:
  Unlike humans, robots don’t make mistakes. So when handing the process over to a robot, we are assured of 100% accuracy.
• Greater Productivity:
  Unlike humans, robots don’t make mistakes. So when handing the process over to a robot, we are assured of 100% accuracy.

Applications of RPA

There are so many applications of RPA, the possibilities are endless. However, these are a few industries that use RPA and how they use them.

• Customer Service:
  RPA helps in automating contact centre tasks such as, uploading scanned documents and verifying information for automatic approvals or rejections.
• Banking and Financial Services:
  Using RPA, they are able to automate tasks, such as customer research, account opening, inquiry processing, anti-money laundering and high-volume data entry.
• Healthcare:
  Medical organizations use RPA for handling patient records, claims, customer support, account management, billing, reporting and analytics.

RPA Basics

To successfully carry out an RPA project, you must understand the following:

• Processes
• Automation Potential
• Project Lifecycle
• RPA Tools
• Roles & their responsibilities

Processes

In simple terms, a process can be defined as a sequence of steps that an organisation undergoes to satisfy an operational need.

For a more technical definition, we can say that a process is a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transforms inputs into outputs.

‍Organisations have many processes as they use them to carry out day to day operations. Sometimes, carrying out these processes takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money.

This drives the organisation to look for more efficient ways to execute these processes, hence, the consideration of RPA.

Types of Processes

There are 4 types of processes:

• Manual and non-repetitive
  ‍The process steps are performed by humans and can be different every time the process is executed.
• Manual and repetitive
  ‍The steps in the process are performed by the user, and at least some of them are the same every time.
• Semi-automated and repetitive
  Some of the repetitive steps have already been automated (using macros, Outlook rules, and so on).
• Automated
  There are processes that have already been automated using other technologies than RPA.

Components of a Process

Every business process consists of the following:

• Inputs - The data that goes in the process.
• Process Flows  - The sequences of sub-processes or activities undertaken in the process.
• Source Applications - The applications or systems used to perform the sub-processes or activities of the process.
• Outputs - The result generated by the process.

As-Is vs. To-Be

When optimizing a process, you mustalways analyse the “as is”  and come upwith a “to be”.

The “As Is” flow shows how the process iscurrently being executed while the “To Be” flow shows how the process would beexecuted after optimization.

After documenting the flows, they arecompared to see how well optimized the process is.

The flows are usually represented withflow charts.

Example (Monthly Bank Statement Upload)

To better understand processes, let’s look at an example. In the organisation, bank statements are supposed to be uploaded monthly to the company’s Google Drive. These are  steps involved in the process:

• At of end of the month different banks send Statement of Account to the company’s email.
• HR personnel opens emails, downloads attachments and saves it on computer.
• HR personnel, uploads bank statements to company’s Google Drive.

Automation Potential

There are two sets of criteria you can use to determine automation potential: process fitness and automation complexity.

• Process Fitness  - This evaluates how fit a process is for  automation. It answers the question,“Can this process be  automated?”
• Automation Complexity  - This evaluates how difficult it is to  automate a process. It answers the question,“How hard is it to  automate this process?”

Process Fitness

Here are the criteria you can use to evaluate how fit a process is for automation:

• Rule Based  - The decisions made in the process can be captured in a pre-defined logic.
• Automatable and/or repetitive process  - Processes that need to stay manual or are non-repetitive aren't good candidates for  automation.
• Standard input  - The input in the process should either be electronic and easily readable or readable using a technology that  can be associated with RPA (such as OCR).
• Stable  - Processes that have been the same for a certain period of time and no changes are expected within the next few months  are good candidates for automation.

Automation Complexity

This set of criteria determines how hard it is to automate a process:

• Number of Screens:  - The higher the number of screens, the more elements have to be captured and configured before process  automation.
• Types of applications:  - Some applications are more easily automated (such as the Office suite or browsers), others heavily  increase the automation effort. And the more different applications there are, the number of screens will increase.
• Business logic scenarios:  - An automation's complexity increases with the number of decision points in the business logic. Basically,  each one could multiply by two times the number of scenarios.
• Types and number of inputs:  - There are cases in which one standard input (such as an invoice) has to be configured for each  supplier that will be affected by the automation. Moreover, non-standard input can be of different complexity grades, with free text  being the most complex.

RPA Project Life Cycle

Now that you have an idea of what RPA is,its benefits and its applications, let’s dive into the implementation of RPA.Every RPA project goes through 6 stages. They are:

• Discovery & Kickoff
• Process Analysis
• Solutions design
• Development & Unit Testing
• Integration & UAT
• Deployment & Hypercare

Discovery & Kickoff

The whole essence of any RPA project isto automate the one or many manual processes that the organisation carries outregularly.

In the discovery stage, theorganisation’s RPA team analyses the different processes and checks to seewhich ones are good candidates for automation.

After determining which processes will beautomated, the team decides on timelines and efforts required for successfuldelivery, and sets up overall expectations for the project.

Process Analysis

In this stage, the RPA team analyses andidentifies the requirements of the processes selected for automation.

The degree of automation is decided basedon this analysis (and on the complexity of the process), and as-is and to-beprocess flows are documented to inform the creation of a future state solution.

The document that is produced in thisstage is called the Process Definition Document

Solutions Design

Once the business requirements of aprocess are finalized, the technical team designs a future state flow and mapsout the various modules that'll have to be developed to complete theautomation.

In other words, it is at this stage thatthe team decides the “to be” flow of the process. The solution is thendocumented in the Solution Design Document.

Development & Unit Testing

In Development and Unit Testing, thesolution outlined in the  Solution Design Document is developed by the RPA developers on the team.

Created modules are tested individuallyto ensure they run successfully in controlled test settings, beforelarger-scale integration testing (next stage).

Integration & UAT (User Acceptance Testing)

In this phase, the RPA development teamtests the developed bots. These bots are tested in a pre-production environmentto examine how the users can use them to automate specific tasks.

If the testing phase gets passedsuccessfully, then it is further transferred to the next stage.

If the testing fails, then it istransferred back to the development phase, where RPA developers examine errorsfound in the testing phase and solve them.

Deployment & Hypercare

Once the UAT is complete (with businesssignoff), the final process packages, libraries and assets are migrated to theproduction Orchestrator and set to run with production robots, which must haveaccess to the production instances of all the applications in scope. 

Hypercare is a limited period which comesright after deployment. At this stage, the implementation team pays closeattention to each process running in production.

Usually, hypercare entails daily sessions where cases runby the automation in production are reviewed and any errors or issues arequickly patched and re-pushed to production.

Roles in an RPA Project

Let us now look at the roles that aretypically involved in an RPA project and what their responsibilities are.  They are:

• Solutions Architect
• Project Manager
• Business Analyst
• RPA Developer

Solutions Architect

They are the ones who define thearchitecture of the RPA solution and oversee it end-to-end, assisting both inthe development, and in the implementation phases.

They select the appropriate set oftechnological tools and features and ensures the alignment of the solution withenterprise guidelines.

They are the ones who create theSolutions Design Document.

Business Analyst

The RPA Business Analysts will be theProcess Subject Matter experts located in business operations.

They will be in charge of creating theprocess definitions and process maps used for automation.

They also ensure that the SolutionsDesign Document matches the business requirements that were captured in theProcess Analysis stage.

RPA Developer

They are in charge of designing,developing, testing the automation workflows and supporting the implementation of the RPA solution.

The Developer works side by side with theBusiness Analyst for documenting process details and assists the engagement team in implementing & testing the solution as well as during maintenance.

Project Manager

The project manager is the individual responsible for delivering the project.

The individual leads and managesthe project team, with authority and responsibility from the projectboard, to run the project on a day-to-day basis. 

RPA Tools

The software that utilizes bots forperforming automation is called the RPA Tool.
Some popular RPA tools include:

• UI Path
• Blue Prism
• Pego
• Work Fusion
• And many more ...

UI Path

UiPath is our preferred RPA tool here at Qucoon.

It is a highly extensible Robotic Process Automation tool that helps to automate desktop or web applications. Itoffers global enterprises to design and deploy a robotic workforce for theirorganizations.

The best thing about UiPath is that itincludes a community edition that comes with drag and drop feature. So, theusers do not need programming knowledge to automate the tasks using UiPath.

The best thing about UiPath is that itincludes a community edition that comes with drag and drop feature. So, theusers do not need programming knowledge to automate the tasks using UiPath.