Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process Automation, (RPA) is an emerging form of process automation technology based on the usage of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.  Dark Star Technology recognizes the importance of this emerging technology and became an early adopter of supporting the new wave of innovation.  Dark Star Technology can provide an assessment of your business area to determine if and how RPA can create competitive advantage for your business.

Software robots are software applications that replicate the actions of human beings interacting with the user interface of a computer system. For example, the execution of data entry into a system (or a full end-to-end business process) would be a typical activity for a software robot.  The software robot operates on the user interface (UI) in the same way that a human would; this is a significant departure from traditional forms of IT integration, which have historically been based on Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs).

RPA automates the robotic functions now performed by humans. The average knowledge worker employed on a back-office process has a lot of repetitive, routine tasks that are dreary and uninteresting. RPA is a type of software that mimics the activity of a human being in carrying out a task within a process. It can do repetitive tasks more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans, freeing them to do other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer.

You can multi-skill each piece of RPA software. It’s lightweight in the sense that you don’t need a lot of IT involvement to get it up and running. Business operations people can learn quite quickly how to configure and apply the robots. It’s lightweight in that it only addresses the presentation layer of information systems. It doesn’t have to address the business logic of the underlying system or the data-access layer.  For example, companies in highly regulated industries such as insurance and banking are finding that automation is a cheap and fast way of applying superior capability to the problem of compliance. You also get better customer service because you’ve got more power in the process. A company that receives lots of customer inquiries, for example, can free staff to deal with the more complex questions.

There are also benefits for employees.  Workers often hated the tasks that the machines now do, and it relieved them of the pressure of  increasing workload, which many organizations are dealing with. There is also a massive increase in the volume of audit regulations and bureaucracy.  RPA can relieve the stress that creates in organizations. One online retailer measures the success of RPA in terms of the number of hours given back to the business. So it’s not just the shareholders, the senior managers, and the customers who benefit, but also employees.