RPA: a tool increasingly used by companies to advance their digital transformation
RPA - Robotic Process Automation - solutions, already tried and tested by large companies, are now attracting interest from businesses of all sizes.
Feedback from experience, combined with the maturity of the RPA tools on offer, is the main reason for the spread of this technique. The health crisis also acted as a gas pedal. This period highlighted, sometimes very cruelly, the difficulty of carrying out critical and recurring tasks when they are highly manual.
In this context, RPA(Robotic Process Automation) appears to be a relevant option, among others, for progressing towards digitalization, with the key to reducing costs and increasing resilience in the face of new crises.
RPA, a term that covers several technologies
To remove the ambiguity, sometimes buried, that lies behind the concept(s) of RPA, we propose, on the basis of our findings, to specify the three levels of automated processing usually found:
1. For fashion and language's sake, some editors call automated (batch) processes Robots.
These programs - night processing, for example - have been around since the dawn of computing. They consist in the execution of computer programs without human intervention. This first level of automation, generally limited to a single application system, is perfectly mastered and is still widely used.
Originally, Batch Processing differs fromTransaction Processing, which involves human users interacting with the IS in real time.
2. It is precisely in this field of Transaction Processing that the promise of RPA lies.
The idea is to automate the tasks concerned as if a real person were performing them, by interacting with all the relevant IT applications and executing the associated transactions. RPA tools are particularly useful in the no-man's-land between applications.
In this context, RPA is essentially applied to repetitive, time-consuming business tasks with little added value. In practice, a program(script) will faithfully reproduce the set of predefined actions - essentially to collect and aggregate data - initially performed by a human user.
3. To overcome the predefined nature of RPA, IPA (Intelligent Process Automation) is being actively developed.
Its ambition is to enable the robot to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. To achieve this, IPA integrates three additional technologies:machine learning, natural language processing and intelligent workflows.
The IPA's promise is to continuously extend the scope of process automation, enabling optimized management of the sharing of roles between humans and robots.
Questions to ask before launching an RPA project
The appropriateness of an RPA or IPA project must be assessed by scoring the interest of the candidate processes and calculating a business case to specify the potential return on investment.
The key questions for clarifying these points concern the maturity of the organization, the performance challenges, the potential for improvement, the nature of the processes/activities, the staff involved, the suitability of the technology for the business need, the existing application assets, etc., and the repositioning of freed-up resources in the target vision.
This last point is essential if we are to remove the potential obstacle of employees associating RPA with downsizing. In practice, initial feedback shows that this is rarely the case. Robots absorb part of the workload on repetitive tasks. They give meaning back to everyone's contribution by freeing up time and expertise to handle tasks of greater interest and added value.
CIOs and RPA
With RPA /IPA projects, the role of CIOs is changing, particularly with regard to the following aspects:
- They must challenge and help the business to produce very precise specifications. Indeed, the accuracy and completeness of specifications, as well as tests, are key to the success of an RPA project.
- They need to become even more agile in their development capacity.
- They need to build up their skills in data scientists and data managers
- Last but not least, CIOs need to integrate support for RPA projects as an integral part of their service offering for .
iQo's value proposition to support your RPA projects
Our hybrid expertise in improving, securing and steering process performance, in business transformation (including IT departments), and in IS governance, enables us to help :
- businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and assess the opportunity of a robotization project
- CIOs to position themselves as business partners to business lines for robotization projects
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