First post on UiPath

So what's that buzz about RPA or why it is a buzzing word nowadays? Let's have a look.

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is an upcoming technology of "Process Automation" whose basis is to put the robot to work for all kinds of laborious manual work e.g. Data entry.

So the next question would be "What exactly is Process Automation?"

In layman terms, Process Automation is the strategy that a business uses to automate the process in-order to reduce the costs.

Also , the other question which may arise is that "Are we actually investing in the robots that we know?"The answer is that we are not investing in any kind of robots in RPA technology. Infact , in RPA technology, robots stands for the software that can be configured to make it work as a robot.

If the RPA idea is still not clear, it can also be explained as follows:

RPA is the application of the technology where people in an organisation will configure the computer software or robot to capture and interpret the existing application and with its help it can perform any kind of highly transactional processes, manipulate the data , trigger responses and also establish communication with other digital systems.

Meaning, RPA will actually replicate the activities or the task performed by the humans in exactly the same way as a human would have interacted.

Here you all would like to know more about "Which kind of firms will be benefited the most with RPA technology?"

Any company with large number of employees who perform general knowledge work process which generally includes high-volume and highly transactional processes can boost their capabilities by saving a lot of time and money by making use of RPA softwares.It can also be interpreted as RPA can automate all low-level clerical tasks performed by humans.Also to add further, RPA can automate all the clerical processes but not all human activities.

A quick differentiation between "Automation" which we know and "RPA": Automation which we are familiar is mostly related to systems integration which is generally done to speed up the processes with better accuracy.E.g.; Stakeholders start getting automated alerts in the form of mails or SMS's when something goes wrong in the production environment.

So , automation which we know refers to direct integration with IT systems at a data level where as robotics essentially replicates human interaction with the interfaces as the human would interact.

Characteristics of RPA : Non-disruptive : It does not requires any chang in the existing system which could be complex and risky.Also it does not change fundamentally the operation of the process.Code-free : It does not requires any coding skills. So it can be adopted by any one or business users as well after providing the necessary training.Business user friendly : RPA's low requirement for technical support and ease of use helps for a quick adoption in business operations.

Need of RPA: When humans lose interest in their jobs, chances of errors and mistakes are more but that is not the case with robots because they don't have interest unlike humans.

Other reasons advocating the need of RPA are as follows: To reduce human errors and human efforts.To save time and improve productivity, accuracy and consistency.

To enhance business analytics and standardize workflow.For complete audit trail activity for compliance purpose.To have a friction less delivery of task.

Cost reduction.

How does RPA works in practice? As i mentioned earlier, RPA is code-free this one word is enough to generate curiosity to know how RPA then works ?

It works with the usage of demonstrative steps.

It's a way of artificial intelligence or rather virtual workers performing the activities as exactly a human does.

Descriptive explanation:

Whenever a new joinee joins a team how he/she will be trained?Obviously, whatever the training will be imparted he/she will be trained in a step-by-step manner.In the same way, we will be providing training to our virtual workers or robots.

Also to mention, the best people to provide training will be SMEs(subject matter experts) and not the IT engineers.

One of the best part is that once trained the virtual workers are permanent and also there will be no attrition like humans.

With all of the above information given you might want to get started with RPA right now. So to get started with RPA you will need RPA tools. There are many tools out there providing great features in RPA space. But the one tool which any one can get started easily is UiPath.

Reasons to get started with UiPath:

1. It has UiPath community forum already with MVP answering your questions or doubts if any.

2. It comes with a Community Edition which is free to use and can be used just after filling a simple registration form.

3. It also contains free tutorial videos(UiPath Academy videos) which will explain you all the basics to get started with RPA with UiPath.

Sample Use Case :

1. Suppose you are browsing for some product on e-commerce e.g., watch and you want an entire list of that product present on that website along with the cost for a quick comparison.But as getting a list will become a tedious manual task, UiPath can come here for rescue. With the help of UiPath capabilities you can automate this task and get a list of all the specified items in a text/excel/csv file format.

2. Other example could be there is a financial firm whose business depends stock market. They need to check the stock market every time by manually visiting in the website. Even here , UiPath can help you out. You can just automate this part by UiPath and also put an additional capability of getting the stock market details in mail every hour or every half an hour to every stakeholder.

Important Links:

UiPath : https://www.uipath.com

Community Edition download : https://www.uipath.com/community

Academy Videos : https://academy.uipath.com/lms