Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology used for any organization or company that is stuck with an old outdated application to manage their process or in case a high amount of integration is needed with external systems, portals, or applications running on someone’s PC.
Main Challenge
Using a specific example of a team dealing with external providers. As part of their duties they must interact with over 100 different external companies, often via web portals. Activities performed via these portals are stretching from retrieving information, creating new content, and updating or modifying data. All portals have a different dynamic and use only about 60% of the time the same information.
Daily interaction with these portals is supposed to be a few times per hour, making it a very costly process. But the SLAs that are set for these activities are not met because it’s impossible for the size of the team to perform these activities as per the described process.
The result is delayed up to 1 hour for any activity performed, ultimately causing end client dissatisfaction for not resolving their case quick enough and the lack of updates they get during the process. When trying to automate a process, you rely on integration with systems. But if the systems don’t have a native capability for integration, for example, no APIs or database access, most companies rely on humans to do the job. The systems can be both internal and external, running as a web application or installed on a desktop. Often the process is interacting with Outlook, Excel, or Word types of applications as well.
The required solution needs to fulfill at least the following key features:
- The ability to interact with all the backend systems such as CRM, CMDB, Network Tools, Knowledge base, logs, and many more.
- The ability to interact with different parts of the network, both retrieving information but also intrusively testing and operating the network.
- The ability to develop and convert a custom process into an end-to-end automated solution.
- The possibility to trigger the solution in different ways, through email, API and portal integration, to make it part of different processes both on the operations and service transition side.
- The ability to see the entire history of all the outputs in a uniform way, making it easy to search and compare.
- The requirement is to fix the issue if possible, by clearing, cleaning, or rebooting a specific service, or any other action needed.
Robot ICT provides a reliable, innovative, and scalable solution using its own framework.
The solution can be deployed in a short period of time and is using industry-standard backend systems.
With the solution, clients can build their own workflows based on existing modules, but also can create new modules that can be included in a workflow.
Triggering a workflow can be done using an API, making it easy to integrate any workflow as part of any CRM system or process. Robot ICT also provides a portal as part of the solution where workflows can be triggered with a granular ability on user rights.
Application Management
- Increase compliance because robots deal better with sensitive data.
- No need to replace applications already invested into. RPA works on top of existing applications.
Driving Process
- Your process becomes more reliable because robots are never sick, on holiday, or changing jobs. Worst case they need to go offline because they need an update
- Your process because very scalable because robots don’t care about workload or data increases, they easily speed and scale up without any additional costs.
- More data can be used as part of the process, data that previously was too labor-intensive to get.
Management
- Lower operational risk due to fewer human errors.
- Higher continuity because of the reliability of the robots. Train them once and they will do the job forever.
- Up or downscaling of the workforce becomes a lot less expensive because you don’t need to train additional robots or pay them if you want to let them go.
- On average, robots cost only 40 % of the lowest administrative wages.
End-UserSatisfaction
- Data is now provided close to real-time because you can time the robots to retrieve information as frequently as you want.
- Users can focus on the more difficult tasks, adding value to the process.
- The agility and customizability of the application.
