The Future Digital Work Force: Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Abstract

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a new wave of the future technologies. Robotic Process Automation is one of the most advanced technologies in the area of computers science, electronic and communications, mechanical engineering and information technology. It is a combination of both hardware and software, networking and automation for doing things very simple. In this light, the research manuscript investigated the secondary data-which is available in google, academic and research databases. The investigation went for totally 6 months, i.e., 1-1-2018 to 30-6-2018. A very few empirical articles, white papers, blogs and were found RPA and came across to compose this research manuscript. This study is exploratory in nature because of the contemporary phenomenon. The keywords used in searching of the database were Robotic Process Automation, RPA, Robots, Artificial Intelligence, Blue Prism. The study finally discovered that Robots and Robotic Process Automation technologies are becoming compulsory as a part to do business operations in the organizations across the globe. Robotic Process Automation can bring immediate value to the core business processes including employee payroll, employee status changes, new hire recruitment and on boarding, accounts receivable and payable, invoice processing, inventory management, report creation, software installations, data migration, and vendor on boarding etc. to name a few applications. Besides, the Robotic Process Automation has abundant applications including healthcare and pharmaceuticals, financial services, outsourcing, retail, telecom, energy and utilities, real estate and FMCG and many more sectors. To put in the right place of RPA in business operations, their many allied technologies are working at the background level, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, data analytics, HR analytics, virtual reality (second life), home automation, blockchain technologies, 4D printing etc. Moreover, it covers the content of different start-ups companies and existing companies-their RPA applications used across the world. This manuscript will be a good guideline for the academicians, researchers, students, and practitioners to get an overall idea.

Robotic Process Automation: Hype or Hope?

“…Concerning the definition of RPA, we observe no consensus in the examined literature. Most authors emphasise that RPA mainly focuses on automating the execution of tasks that were previously performed by humans [2,[8][9][10][11][12]. For this purpose, software robots are configured to capture and interpret existing applications [1,2,13] mostly on the level of graphical interfaces [5,9,14].…”

“…When recording routines on graphical user interfaces, RPA tools retrieve anchors through APIs and HTML code [5]. Additionally, we observe diverging opinions on the inclusion of traditional screen scraping [5,11,12,21], which only relies on pixel coordinates on the screen to replicate user actions [11]. In flowcharts, configured process elements are visually arranged to display the process execution.…”

“…While we do not want to elaborate on the question of when and where to apply RPA, we consider it an important aspect to understand the technology. The examined literature mostly mentions the following requirements: There should be a high volume [1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14-16, 21, 24, 25] of repetitive processes [1,4,8,9,[11][12][13]24] to justify the costs associated with an automation project [24]. Furthermore, the processes should be rule-based [1,4,8,9,11,12,14,15,24,26] and consist of fixed procedures [9].…”

“…Kaya et al [2] disclose that the costs of an RPA solution can be one-fifth of the price of a full-time employee performing the same task. These savings can be attributed to the low-cost implementation [4,10,11,14] and inexpensive integration of RPA into an organisation's infrastructure due to its non-invasive nature [12,14,15,25]. Compared to other automation solutions, RPA is considered "lightweight" IT [11,14].…”

Towards a macroscope: Leveraging technology to transform the breadth, scale and resolution of macroecological data

“…Therefore, these tools are integral to the macroscope in providing large but detailed snapshots of marine ecosystems and their inhabitants (Williams et al, 2012). The development of tools to automate data processing and detection of organisms from this imagery will be required for these tools to reach their full potential as part of the macroscope (Madakam, Holmukhe, & Jaiswal, 2019).…”