Recently I have attended: Transform your organization through RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

What is RPA

“RPA” refers to a set of modular software programs (or“bots”) to complete structured, repeatable, and logic-based tasks by mimicking the actions taken by existing human staff.

Why an organisation would need that?

Transform your organization through RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
See the full certificate at the end of this post

There are many advantages, but personally I see also a few Cons.

Transforming an organisation through software development undertaking, within waterfall (or even Agile) projects is way too long, given the current external environment in which everything is moving very fast. Digitisation, disruption, all happen at an incredible speed. RPA is not a classic software development project, but something that could be delivered way more fast. It is in between an operational work and a full software delivered within a classical project meant to automate processes.

Developed bots are capable of interacting with and integrating disparate enterprise applications, databases, and files to limit the business need to develop custom, application specific integrations.

How it works

A set of scheduled bots are capable of running on multiple servers within a company’s environment simultaneously with minimal impact to resource and network capacity.

Practically, if an organisation has many operations (and repetitive) supported by different systems (there is no integrated ERP for all activities, for example) and use a software for invoicing, another software for managing suppliers, and so on, RPA is recommended to be considered.

Cons: I see at least a disadvantage, namely security. A risk assessment is needed anyway, followed by actions to mitigate those risks. For example, as the bots within a RPA solution may use powerfull user accounts in various systems or applications, access to them need to be properly protected from unauthorised staff.

A company that is of Romanian origin that delivers RPA solutions as its core business is UI Path. They are the first Romanian unicorn (assets valued at more than 1 billion USD) company.