Innovation is inextricably linked to technologies which, over time, alternate and compete to establish themselves, sometimes in an antagonistic way, sometimes in a complementary way with each other.
Each of these technologies has its own life cycle, but none of those that impose themselves on the market escapes an inexorable process of maturation, which leads them to pass from the “Buzzword” to the “Keyword” stage, so to arrive finally to the “Mainstream” stage. Process Automation and the technologies that represent its enabling platform are no exception: Low Code, RPA and Cognitive are “keywords” already well rooted in the present and certainly destined for rapid and intense development in the future.
In this historical moment, we all are called to interpret the radical changes taking place and, hopefully, to become active protagonists. In particular, to adapt processes to the changed and increasingly changing conditions surrounding us today, companies must:
Every company must have a digital ecosystem in which digital platforms, mostly in the Cloud, processes and people deeply interact. Technologies, are fundamental, although alone are not enough. Companies must have a precise “Business Driven” renewal Roadmap set by a careful and aware management.
Everyone agrees that automating processes are becoming an essential practice in the digital strategy of any company.
It is also very important to adopt state-of-the-art technologies, and Automation Anywhere, of which we have been a proud partner since March 2020, plays a primary role in the world panorama of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Players.
In recent decades, companies have invested large amounts of time and money in implementing information systems to meet all, or almost all, business needs.
Today time has come to move from this phase of “digitization” to a subsequent and challenging phase of “Automation” by exploiting the investments made in the abundant production of software that make up the IT assets of companies.
In the words of Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-Founder of Automation Anywhere, “… Bots will become real ‘digital colleagues’ and automating repetitive processes will make work more ‘human’ …”.
The future scenario, but not far away indeed is already current, will see the presence of Digital Workers who will support human beings in the most demanding, repetitive and less creative tasks, leaving human beings with the most valuable activities.
Company employees have already adopted an RPA approach to a large extent agree in seeing software bots as a valuable aid to their work. The initial fear of losing one’s job has gradually been replaced by a positive perception of the new Process Automation technologies. In many cases, operators themselves ask their companies to scale towards increasingly refined man-machine collaboration solutions.
This is Desktop Software to automate business processes by replicating the activities usually performed by operators and using the same applications and tools already present in the company.
Through the RPA approach, not only can you have a virtual, accurate, fast and always available workforce, but you can take full advantage of the investments made by companies over the years for the purchase and development of applications.
The latter become, in fact, powerful “Software Libraries” that men and Bots can exploit to improve the quality of business processes.
The main benefits of adopting RPA technologies are:
Traditional automation is mainly based on programming, on APIs, on protocols and interfaces to integrate different systems.
Conversely, RPA reproduces the actions of a user at the user interface level.
In traditional Automation the developer must have good knowledge of the target system, while in the RPA approach we do not have to worry about the complexity of the underlying applications since the Robot imitates the user’s actions.
The traditional approach requires you to often work with Legacy products which, most of the time, are not designed for integration and do not expose solid APIs.
Finally, the RPA approach makes it possible to bring out the same operating mechanisms of the processes that are often “buried” in some drawer or even in the heads of a few Stakeholders.
In fact, in order to train a Bot to carry out a series of tasks underlying a given process, it is necessary, first of all, to fully understand the process itself and formalize all the states, the actions and the events that determine the changes of state.
Our Business Analysts are able to help Customers to proceed towards Process Mining.
An innovative tool that Automation Anywhere has recently launched on the market is fundamental: Discovery Bot.
A significant part of business activities, manual and repetitive, which could be automated, remain, in reality, “hidden”.
Automation Anywhere Discovery Bot uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to capture and analyze user actions as they navigate business applications to discover common and repetitive process steps.
It also suggests the Automation priorities based on the potential return on investment and helps in the development of Bots, accelerating the Process Automation path.
The more the Bots are used, the more it will be possible to train them in deeper and deeper activities. In other words, you will have the opportunity to have real “Bot Stores”, internal or external to the company, from which to acquire Digital Workers with specialized “Skills”.
In this direction, Artificial Intelligence plays a fundamental role and allows Bots a fair “cognitive” autonomy.
In recent years, great strides have been made in the creation of “intelligent” systems capable of understanding the meaning of text, images and extracting data and even semantics from documents.
Machine Learning techniques and Neural Networks are already able to do great things on structured or slightly unstructured documents which, moreover, make up most of the document corpus associated with business processes (invoices, identity documents, credit cards, etc.).
In this direction, Automation Anywhere has developed IQ bot, a Robot that learns from people how to manage unstructured and unclear data so that processes can be entirely automated.
By adding “Intelligence” to Process Automation it is therefore possible to make a further qualitative leap.
It won’t be just the processes
to be automated, but also less “regular” and less “structured” processes.
And this thanks to the possibility of introducing:
