Robotic Process Automation (RPA), BPM and BPMS

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There’s a fair amount of excitement around Robotic Process Automation or RPA. Some of it is just hype and some of it has substance. In February of this year, *Forrester forecasted that the size of the RPA market will reach $2.9 billion by 2021 – only to quickly point out that this number pales in comparison to the size of the total Artificial Intelligence (AI) spend estimated at $48.5 billion. Forrester also estimated that there will be over 4 million robots doing office and administrative and sales and related tasks by 2021 and the cost of an RPA robot is currently in the $5,000 to $10,000 range per annum. As a single robot may replace as many as three to five workers – the savings are easy to calculate.**  Further, the return on investment (ROI) from RPA has been predicted at a potential of 30–200% —in the first year. ***

While the use of robots is far from new – in the automotive industry the first robot was reported to have been built in 1962 by General Motors – the use of software robots or “bots” to automate high transaction volume, repetitive, and boring work has developed considerably in the past few years. Part of the attraction is that RPA is intended to simply automate work and replicate what humans do. This means that in the majority of cases, negligible process redesign is involved. RPA intends simply to replicate exactly what a human would have done to complete a business operation e.g. if Wealth Management Advisor needs to log into three different systems to onboard a customer then the Robot will do the same thing -except much faster, cheaper and with fewer errors. This is why RPA is sometimes called the “Virtual Workforce”. This also means that RPA has broader applicability to Back Office operations and the cost to automate is typically less as there are few - if any - changes to existing systems.****

Going beyond the hype, there are indeed some substantial practical aspects of RPA that account for the current level of interest.

  • Modest project scope: typically aimed at eliminating repetitive rules-based work. A project might begin at the procedure level and move on to progressively more complex automation - or not.

  • Minimal systems integration: since RPA typically automates by mimicking human actions at the user interface (UI) level, there is typically minimal intrusion on the underlying systems themselves.

  • Small IT department footprint: by avoiding systems integration issues, RPA doesn’t place the resource demands of a large scale implementation project on the IT department.

  • Minimal Database Intrusion: by engaging data on the presentation layer RPA automation can often avoid data security issues.*****

Vendors of BPMS software have recognized the potential of RPA. For example, Pegasystems, known for its rules based BPMS, acquired OpenSpan, a RPA vendor with over a decade of experience. On the other hand, Appian – known for its low code, in the cloud based BPMS – entered into a strategic alliance with Blue Prism – one of the leading RPA providers.

Forrester’s evaluation of robotic process automation (RPA) providers, identified the 12 of the most significant ones — Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Contextor, EdgeVerve Systems, Kofax, Kryon Systems, NICE, Pegasystems, Redwood Software, Softomotive, UiPath, and WorkFusion — and evaluated them as depicted below.******

Spayni image 1 july

There is also significant potential synergy in combining Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Management Suites (BPMS), and RPA. First of all, employing the BPM method for a disciplined approach to modeling, analysis, design and management of business processes can create the context to get the most out of both RPA and BPMS. A systematic examination of the end to end process will pinpoint the best opportunities to apply RPA for rapid results. Further, the end to end perspective also pinpoints other low hanging fruit related to items such as outdated policies, ineffective metrics, and non-value added handoffs, etc. Next, BPMS software provides important features and capabilities to apply workflow, rules, document management, analytics, and simulation. When BPM and BPMS are combined with RPA organizations can go well beyond simply replicating human activities and begin the fundamental redesign of how work is done.

 

References:

*https://www.forrester.com/report/The+RPA+Market+Will+Reach+29+Billion+By+2021/-/E-RES137229  

**ibid 

***http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-next-acronym-you-need-to-know-about-rpa 

****https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-robotics-process-automation-rpa-different-graham-ferguson 

*****ibid

******The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q1 2017 

Comments

Ankit Tara
,
posted 6 years 6 days ago

2. Merhaba, Allow me to show

2. Merhaba, Allow me to show my gratitude ASHA24 bloggers. You guys are like unicorns. Never seen but always spreading magic. Your content is yummy. So satisfied.
I am able to resolve this issue with ( 2 excel files) one excel (with header) and with another excel( withour header). see below steps --> step 1) define any 3 local variable like i = 1, j = 0, k = NULL stpe 2) excel command - Open Excel ( Contains header - Yes, you can make it as No in your machine ) step 3) excel : Go to Cell A1 step 4) now here we need perform loop operation for count number like 1000 because we may not know how many columns in the provided excel sheet ( i have kept it as - 50 for me because i know there are only 10 columns in my excel sheet ) step 5) in loop - Get value of Active Cell ( A1 cell ) and assing this value to variable 'i' step 6) in loop (Add if commend )- if command - check if 'i'<> 'k' ( as 'k' is null we defined earlier )
note: if 'i' variable( value of active cell) is not null then only below command will be executed , this will also ensure us that we are only considering only non-empty columns step 7) in loop - (inside of ) if command - add 1 in variable 'j' ( this variable will hold the count of the columns of excel ) step 8) in loop - end if ( end of if command) step 9) in loop - excel go to one cell right of active cell
note : this command will allow is to move to right cell ( next column ) of excel sheet step 10) end of loop command step 11) close the excel sheet step 12) message box - variable 'j' which is the exact column count of excel sheet But great job man, do keep posted with the new updates.
follow Obrigado,
Ankit Tara
,
posted 6 years 1 week ago

Hello Mate, THANKS SO MUCH

Hello Mate,
THANKS SO MUCH for sharing this! I would love to buy you a coffee since I now won’t be up all night that has been driving me crazy (until now!!). I just wish I knew what was going wrong but so glad it’s in the right place now! Thanks again:) I was used UiPathStudio 2016.2(NOT CommunityEdition).
And I set up the latest version of 2017.1 in this environment with default values, but please let me know some questions.
1. Why does Studio arbitrarily become a Community Edition?
2. It seems that it was divided into Studio and Robot, but can I do the following things?
A) Develop on the machine on which Studio is set up.
b) Run that xaml on the machine where only Robot setuped environment.
*Since there is no Studio as before,but now there is no Run button.
How do I use a robot? I don’t want to use Orchestrator, I wanna execute with Attended (FrontOffice).
Can I create a shortcut and pass xaml’s path to that command line argument? By the way do you have any YouTube videos, would love to < a href=" https://asha24.com/blog/use-cases-for-uipath"> watch it . I would like to connect you on LinkedIn, great to have experts like you in my connection (In case, if you don’t have any issues).
Please keep providing such valuable information.
Thanks a heaps,
Ganesh
Adeel Javed
,
posted 6 years 24 weeks ago

In my opinion, RPA

In my opinion, RPA compliments BPMS very nicely, it can actually increase adoption of BPMS, and vice versa. I recently wrote about the same topic in my article "How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together". There are two different approaches that can be used to make a BPMS and an RPA tool work together in harmony. 1) Process-Driven RPA: The idea behind Process-Diven RPA approach is that your process keeps running inside a BPMS without any major modifications. You automate non-value add swivel chair activities by using the digital workforce (bots) provided by the RPA tool. This approach can help you (in a way) integrate with systems that might not have been possible otherwise and more importantly free up your human resources, who can work on value-add work instead. 2) RPA-Initiated Process: As the name suggests, the idea behind RPA-Initiated Process approach is that when a bot has not been trained to handle exception cases, it requests human intervention. The bot completes its processing, kicks off a human activity inside BPMS and moves on to the next set of work. This approach works great when a majority of the time a bot is able to complete processing without issues, but in those minor instances when they do find anomalies, a process is kicked off in BPMS so that a human can follow-up and resolve the issue. References:
* What Is RPA (Robotic Process Automation): https://adeeljaved.com/2016/12/13/what-is-rpa-robotic-process-automation/
* How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together – Part 1: https://adeeljaved.com/2017/04/19/make-bpms-rpa-work-together/
* How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together – Part 2: https://adeeljaved.com/2017/08/09/make-bpms-rpa-work-together-part-2/
* Getting Started with Digital Process Automation: https://adeeljaved.com/digital-process-automation/
Adeel Javed
,
posted 6 years 26 weeks ago

In my opinion, RPA

In my opinion, RPA compliments BPMS very nicely, it can actually increase adoption of BPMS, and vice versa. I recently wrote about the same topic in my article "How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together". There are two different approaches that can be used to make a BPMS and an RPA tool work together in harmony. 1) Process-Driven RPA: The idea behind Process-Diven RPA approach is that your process keeps running inside a BPMS without any major modifications. You automate non-value add swivel chair activities by using the digital workforce (bots) provided by the RPA tool. This approach can help you (in a way) integrate with systems that might not have been possible otherwise and more importantly free up your human resources, who can work on value-add work instead. 2) RPA-Initiated Process: As the name suggests, the idea behind RPA-Initiated Process approach is that when a bot has not been trained to handle exception cases, it requests human intervention. The bot completes its processing, kicks off a human activity inside BPMS and moves on to the next set of work. This approach works great when a majority of the time a bot is able to complete processing without issues, but in those minor instances when they do find anomalies, a process is kicked off in BPMS so that a human can follow-up and resolve the issue. References:
* What Is RPA (Robotic Process Automation): https://adeeljaved.com/2016/12/13/what-is-rpa-robotic-process-automation/
* How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together – Part 1: https://adeeljaved.com/2017/04/19/make-bpms-rpa-work-together/
* How To Make BPMS And RPA Work Together – Part 2: https://adeeljaved.com/2017/08/09/make-bpms-rpa-work-together-part-2/
* Getting Started with Digital Process Automation: https://adeeljaved.com/digital-process-automation/

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