Digital Transformation

CHAPTER 5Robotic Process Automation

This chapter provides an overview of robotic process automation and its ability to automate business processes to reduce costs and have limited dependency on IT resources. It also discusses the implementation methodology and some of the typical processes across business functions and industries that are potential candidates for automation to make the enterprise efficient and intelligent.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Overview

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of technology to emulate the step‐by‐step activities that a human user would perform on a computer. This technology is leveraged to make the enterprise intelligent and efficient by automating the business and IT processes that are repetitive, rule‐based, and use structured data as inputs. RPA involves the use of software “robots” that can easily be configured with minimal technical expertise and can be quickly trained and deployed to automate manual tasks.

RPA was initially designed for blue‐collar jobs to execute administrative and monotonous work, but with time, it has now evolved as a catalyst for innovation to do advanced analysis of unstructured data using natural language processing. A further advanced version of RPA is known as intelligence process automation (IPA), which utilizes new IT technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate some of the business and computational decision making that were typically done manually by human beings. ...