Robotic Process Automation: Overview, Trends, and Examples

Executive Summary

The term “robotic process automation” is somewhat misleading. There are no robots involved, at least not the mechanical variety. The adjective “robotics” refers to software robots, or “bots” – programs designed to help automate the performance of common white-collar business processes.

The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) defines robotic process automation (RPA) as “the term used for software tools that partially or fully automate human activities that are manual, rule-based, and repetitive. [RPA] tools are not replacements for the underlying business applications; rather, they simply automate the already manual tasks of human workers. They essentially look at the screens that workers today look at and fill in and update the same boxes and fields within the user interface by pulling the relevant data from the relevant location.”¹

Importantly, from a software integrity and security perspective, RPA tools “sit on top of” an enterprise’s information infrastructure, rather than being integrated in the manner of an application programming interface (API). This makes RPA tools easier to deploy and, if necessary, withdraw from business process flows. It also aids in the acceptance of RPA by business process owners, many of whom are not IT experts.²

Transitional Technology

Robotic process automation exists on the automation spectrum between “business process automation” (BPA) software – like enterprise resource planning (ERP) – and “intelligent process automation” (IPA) software, which features machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Evan Campbell, a managing director in the Technology Strategy and Operations practice at Protiviti, observes that “RPA is really the first jumping-off step toward intelligent automation.”³

RPA Types

Analyst Margaret Rouse divides RPA bots into three broad categories:

• “Probots are bots that follow simple, repeatable rules to process data.
• “Knowbots are bots that search the Internet to gather and store user-specified information.
• “Chatbots are virtual agents who can respond to customer queries in real time.”⁴

Chatbots, of course, are the most familiar RPA type since they feature in home applications. Note that while chatbots in the form of intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are popular among consumers, an even larger enterprise market is emerging, facilitating what is known as “conversational commerce.”

Partial Automation

Although some processes are too intricate to be fully automated, RPA remains a viable process improvement option. According to a leading provider, Automated Anywhere, “RPA bots can work in both ‘attended’ and ‘unattended’ modes. Typically used for front-office operations, attended bots are useful when the entire end-to-end process can’t be automated. RPA processes that require no human input are called ‘unattended’. Not all RPA solutions are capable of both attended and unattended automation.”⁵

Task Capture

RPA applications often inform their own execution through “process mining,” especially “task capture, As described by analyst Kyle L. Wiggers, task capture “comes as employees move through a work process they’d like to automate by taking screenshots, using drag-and-drop designers, and pulling data like window names and descriptions together into a process definition document.”⁶

RPA Benefits

RPA is a fundamental ingredient in the “digital transformation” movement, which Salesforce describes as “the process of using digital technologies to create new – or modify existing – business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.”⁷

The commonly cited advantages of RPA include:

1. Accelerating business operations – thereby enhancing business opportunities.
2. Achieving greater accuracy – eliminating tedious and unnecessary rework.
3. Regaining employee time – freeing employees to engage in more productive and profitable activities.
4. Cutting costs – improving the “bottom line.”
5. Providing better customer experiences – increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing customer churn.
6. Ensuring regulatory compliance – avoiding fines and other governmental sanctions.
7. Improving employee productivity – enabling a more satisfying work environment, both for employers and employees.
8. Permitting cross-platform work processes – leveraging the fact that RPA is application agnostic.
9. Allowing scalable processes – expanding or contracting processes according to business demand and operational capabilities.
10. Harnessing artificial intelligence – extending, for example, the boundaries of automation to include unstructured data.⁸

With respect to employee productivity, while RPA allows employees to redirect their energies to more complex functions, or activities more suited to their education and experience, RPA also enables enterprise management to affect workforce reductions, an issue that must be “front and center” in RPA planning.

RPA Vs. EPA

Robotic process automation (RPA) is often distinguished from expert process automation (EPA), which requires the active intervention of “expert” contributors, as illustrated below.

RPA Vs. EPA
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bot Store

Automation Anywhere maintains a “Bot Store” that offers a wide variety of pre-built bots.

For example, the “Language Translation and Text Utility Using IBM Watson” bot, which is available for free, can translate up to 70 different languages from an input string, and detect character count and word count.

Here’s how it works:

Tasks:

• Detect the input language from the input text.
• Translate the input text into a target language.
• Get the character count of the string.
• Get the word count of the string.

Input: This bot can take any text inputs like prompt, excel file, text, etc.

Action: The bot uses a language detection API to detect the language of the input text, and uses a language translator API to translate the input text into a target language.

Output: The output is a translated text which can be used to log data, fill fields on forms, or even display in a message box for viewing.

RPA Use Cases

In most cases, robotic process automation is ideal for automating jobs that are manual, rule-based, and repetitive. In selecting potential candidates, enterprise officials should prioritize processes that are:

• High volume – justifying the cost of RPA investment.
• Stable – avoiding the need for periodic RPA “tweaking”.⁹

Business Process Reengineering

To affect substantial and sustainable business process improvement, RPA should be viewed as one component of a larger, more comprehensive business process reengineering (BPR) program. BPR is the systematic study of business processes with the goal of streamlining and otherwise optimizing business operations:

• Reducing resource requirements
• Lowering execution time
• Cutting costs
• Improving overall process efficiency and effectiveness

The Universal Utility

The inherent appeal of robotic process automation lies in its universality, as all enterprise operations:

• Consist of processes
• Are increasingly digital (owing to the digital transformation movement)
• Can be improved through automation

As itemized by analyst Alexis Veenendaal, general-purpose RPA applications include:

Human Resources

• Spent analytics and reporting
• Learning and development administration
• Position management
• Travel and/or expense management
• Payroll batch importing and validation
• Employee benefit invoice reconciliation
• New-starter onboarding
• Employee master data
• User credentials creation
• Access termination

Finance and Accounting

• Expense reimbursement
• Financial planning and analysis (FP&A)
• Accounts payable and accounts receivable processing
• Accounting change
• Account and bank reconciliations
• Reporting

Industry use cases and representative applications include:

• Financial Services – Fraud detection
• Manufacturing – Supply chain management
• Telecommunications – Customer onboarding and offboarding
• Insurance – Underwriting
• Retail – Inventory management
• Healthcare – Patient outreach and post-treatment care
• Logistics – Shipment scheduling and tracking
• Energy & Utilities – Technician dispatching and reporting
• Aviation – Air traffic control
• Government – Surveys and census management¹⁰

Trends and Futures

RPA Market

Polaris Market Research predicts that the global robotic process automation market, valued at $3,661.89 million in 2023, will reach $66,079.34 million by 2032, realizing a remarkable compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.9 percent during the 2023-2032 forecast period.

According to Polaris, the forces driving the RPA market include:

• The old – improving operational performance and productivity.
• The new – integrating bots with more contemporary technologies, such as advanced machine learning (ML), optical character recognition (OCR), and modern data analytics. 

Among the more prominent players in the RPA space are:

• Automation Anywhere
• Blue Prism
• Microsoft
• UiPath¹¹

Intelligent Process Automation

As enterprise officials enjoy the benefits of RPA, their attention will turn, almost inevitably, to the potential for intelligent process automation (IPA). As illustrated below, IPA is, itself, a process, starting with initial automation efforts and culminating in actual artificial intelligence (AI).

Along with RPA, intermediate phases include:

• “Autonomics,” which involves the creation of self-regulating, self-healing computer systems;¹² and
• “Cognitive computing,” which is the simulation of human thought in a computerized model.¹³

Intelligent Process Automation Spectrum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Automate Everything

Rather than invoking RPA technology selectively and judiciously, there is a tendency among some RPA proponents – propelled, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic – to automate everything, often with mixed results.

As reported by analyst Tom Taulli, according to Alex Rinke, CEO of Celonis, “The impact of COVID has driven reduced workforces to look for any help they can get and, in the short term, the automation-fix might feel good, but the automation-tax is going to be high once those bots start limping and eventually breaking down. This approach has proven to be brittle and fails when the business changes, because it automates steps regardless of the business context, process situation, management objectives, etc. It ‘assumes’ there is always one way to execute things – which is never the case in business.”¹⁴

Recommendations

Engage RPA Experts

Prior to any RPA planning, enterprise officials should consult with leading RPA providers like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Microsoft, and UiPath:

• First, to evaluate the firms’ RPA platforms, and whether these platforms are compatible and interoperable with the enterprise’s information infrastructure; and
• Second, to determine whether the firms offer any free or paid bots that satisfy specific enterprise automation needs.

Consider Cybersecurity Implications

Leading accounting and consulting firm EY reminds us that “As robotics become mainstream, these new entrants to the IT environment represent additional vectors for compromise. Abuse of privileged access, mismanaged access entitlements, and disclosure of sensitive data are valid concerns. Additionally, platform security vulnerabilities, privacy implications, and denial of service may yield ramifications that impact the RPA integrity, reliability, and downstream business processes.”¹⁵

Fix, Then Automate

Only well-running processes should be automated. If a process is flawed – or, in some respects, suboptimal – the process should be first repaired, and second automated.

Manage Human Resources

While RPA is relatively non-disruptive infrastructure-wise, it can be extremely disruptive personnel-wise. Consequently, EY urges enterprise officials to “determine the new role of people – [to] recognize that roles and responsibilities will be altered as a result of RPA implementations.”¹⁶

Close coordination with Human Resources and Legal will be essential.

Plan for IPA

Robotic process automation is a transitional (some would say stopgap) technology – an efficient means of enhancing enterprise processes on the way to intelligent process automation, where self-learning software can produce self-improving enterprise operations.

Before committing resources to any RPA initiatives, enterprise officials should chart a start-to-finish automation course, starting with securing internal support.

As analyst Alexis Veenendaal observes, “RPA needs to be widely embraced and understood by the business as a whole, with strong support from leadership teams. Otherwise, you’re opening yourself up to huge headaches down the road. To avoid this, it is essential to involve people in identifying automation opportunities and affirming their value. This will get you the resources, time, and traction for scaling your RPA project.

“For a successful implementation, it’s a good idea to develop an RPA ‘Center of Excellence’ (CoE). This involves identifying and engaging those people in your organization who are best suited to act as champions for RPA. Find those engaging in key roles: your change manager, subject experts for your processes, and those who will be operating your bots.”¹⁷

Web Links

• Automation Anywhere: https://www.automationanywhere.com/
• Blue Prism: https://www.blueprism.com/
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
• UiPath: https://www.uipath.com/

References

¹ “What Is Robotic Process Automation?” AIIM. 2019.

² Margaret Rouse. “Robotic Process Automation (RPA).” TechTarget. 2019.

³ Ericka Chickowski. “Why Robotic Process Automation Has a Bright Future with Enterprise IT.” TechBeacon | Micro Focus. 2019.

⁴ Margaret Rouse. “Robotic Process Automation (RPA).” TechTarget. 2019.

⁵ “Seven Predictions for the 2019 RPA Market.” Automation Anywhere. p.5.

⁶ Kyle L. Wiggers. “A Definitive Primer on Robotic Process Automation.” VentureBeat. May 2, 2021.

⁷ “What Is Digital Transformation?” Salesforce.com, Inc. 2019.

⁸ “Robotic Process Automation (RPA).” Automation Anywhere. 2021.

⁹ Ericka Chickowski. “Why Robotic Process Automation Has a Bright Future with Enterprise IT.” TechBeacon | Micro Focus. 2019.

¹⁰ Alexis Veenendaal. “A Comprehensive Guide to Robotic Process Automation: What Is RPA? Robotic Process Automation Explained.” Blue Prism Limited. 2023.

¹¹ “Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market Size, Share, Trends, & Industry Analysis Report, By Process (Automated Solution, Decision Support & Management Solution, Interaction Solution); By Operation; By Type; By Industry; By Organization Size; By Region: Segment Forecast, 2023 – 2032.” Polaris Market Research. 2023.

¹² Katie Behrens. “What’s in a Name: RPA vs. Autonomics.” UiPath. March 16, 2015.

¹³ Bernard Marr. “What Everyone Should Know About Cognitive Computing.” Forbes. March 23, 2016.

¹⁴ Tom Taulli. “RPA (Robotic Process Automation): Predictions for Next Year.” Forbes. December 19, 2020.

¹⁵ “Risk and Control Considerations Within Robotic Process Automation Implementations.” EYGM Limited. 2018:4.

¹⁶ Ibid. p.9.

¹⁷ Alexis Veenendaal. “A Comprehensive Guide to Robotic Process Automation: What Is RPA? Robotic Process Automation Explained.” Blue Prism Limited. 2023.