Robotic Process Automation Webinar Slides

Editor's Notes

• #3: Lewis introduce himself and then next slide to officially intro Julie
• #4: Hi Everyone, My name is Rajib from Smarterp. I am the SME on Smart RPA and today we will discuss about RPA.
• #5: Before we begin, we must understand what is RPA. What is difference between conventional automation. What are it’s advantages and disadvantages over BPM. << PRESSS ENTER>> To understand this better, let us take the example of autonomous cars. The key objectives of this transformational project is to get cars drive by itself with no compromise towards security. And these cars can take you anywhere as long as there is a street or a road. << PRESS ENTER>> To achieve this, there are two approaches. One is the conventional approach. This approach needs to change all streets, roads to a modern infrastructure with devices are radar, laser guided lanes. Obviously this is a time consuming and costly task to complete. <<PRESS ENTER>> Next is communication. Whatever is there in the streets should be able to communicate with each other and at reasonably fast speeds as well. This can be achieved by enabling everything with IOT. And in order to achieve that our internet services and communication devices have to be uplifted. This adds more cost and time to the project. << PRESS ENTER>> And then all the old cars also needs ti be replaced as they cannot be upgraded and hence replaced with more modern cars. << PRESS ENTER >> Now lets see what are the advantages of such an approach. Such approach of automation is 100% accurate when completed. This also brings in long term. As for this example, you get an upgraded infrastructure, better and safer roads, improved connectivity as a the by product. And of course, bring efficiency in the process. << PRESS ENTER>> By now, we are aware that this approach definitely cannot be completed in months. It will take years if every car in this globe has to be autonomous. And yes, it will be expensive and intrusive. By intrusive, this approach will demand changes in adjoining infrastructure as well. This approach is sometimes referred to BPM in IT. And is still relevant and important in IT and will continue to be.
• #6: Now let us take another approach, where we fit a robot in the car. The job of this robot is to learn the drivers behavior and characteristics of driving. For example, when does the driver apply brakes and at what speed? What triggers this action? The robot after some period of learning and training understand that the driver applies the brakes softly when he sees a red light, slow down sign and curves. And each time he does that he does it differently for each of the triggers. Based on this principle, the robot in the car learns how to drive. << PRESS ENTER>> This approach although seems time consuming, taking into account the time the robot takes time to train, but is at least 10 times faster than the approach we discussed earlier. Remember google uses the same technology for their autonomous cars. And some telsa owners as well claim that their car is becoming more personal as it gets to know you. Surprisingly, a car owned by a left handed owner behaves differently from a right handed owner. This is because the robot learns from the patterns of the owner. << PRESS ENTER>> But this approach also has its own disadvantages. It’s accuracy is never as good as the previous approach. If not instrumented properly, it can cause delays and unable to provide appropriate results. To summarize, this approach is Robotic Process Automation; where a software robot learns human behavior and actions. And performs the activities. And when we aid RPA with Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, we call it Smart RPA. << PRESS ENTER>> Now for the big question. Does this mean RPA is better that Business Process Automations?? <<PRESS ENTER>> The answer to this question depends on what you want to achieve. Each of them has their own pros and cons which needs to be evaluated. Later on this webinar we will talk about where to use and where not to use RPA.
• #7: Now that we understood, what is RPA and how it is different from conventional business process automations, lets talk for a while about the obvious benefits why you should implement RPA. << PRESS ENTER>> The most important aspect of RPA is that it is quick to implement. This in turn reduces the turnaround time of your processes. << PRESS ENTER >> Also robots work much faster than human beings and they do not have fixed work timings. Imagine you leave your office in the evening and overnight the software robot takes care of the mundane task you were supposed to perform. << PRESS ENTER>> As in the case of our autonomous car example, we change the roads, cars and technology to have the cars self-drive. And we agree to proceed with the BPM approach. So we invest millions of dollars only to get return of investments years down the timeline. In RPA you always get short wins at every phase of the automation. << PRESS ENTER>> Apart from the cost savings in terms of human effort and time, the development time in case of RPA is 5 times faster. This is achieved by majority of the RPA platforms providing guided development. This means you develop faster automations. << PRESS ENTER >> And obviously now your employees would focus on more critical things like customer interaction, instead of performing repeated tasks like copy pasting data from one place to another, validating information and accuracy. << PRESS ENTER >> Imagine one of your customer calls up, where he is unable to login to the application. With RPA his issue can be resolved in minutes and provide better turn around time. It is not only faster to process a business request but also implement automation of a business process. << PRESS ENTER >> RPA development embraces a staggered development approach. For example, RPA delivers small pieces of code that solves a part of the business problem. And any change that happens in between it easily accommodated. Taking our autonomous cars as an example, imagine that after 1 year of work, it was found that our internet infrastructure is not upto mark yet. So the project gets stalled. << PRESS ENTER>> And above all RPA improves efficiency, typically where there are disjoint business processes. We will discuss about this in the next example.
• #8: Until now, we know what is RPA and its benefits. Next, let us take an example that almost every enterprises have. The lady in your screen is Cathy. She is employed with ABC Corporation in the Finance department. She manages the account payable process for the organization.
• #9: One of her key responsibilities, is to check for invoices that she receives in company’s finance departments email box.
• #10: In this case, she has received an email from one of the vendors. She has to validate the information for accuracy and look for any inconsistencies. <<PRESS ENTER>> If all is well, she then takes the input from the invoice in a prescribed excel file format. She needs it for her future reference. << PRESS ENTER>> Once that is done, she opens the company’s ERP portal and enters the detail in the portal. Once the information is entered in the company’s finance system, she updates her excel and sends an email to vendor that his/her invoice is under processing. <<PRESS ENTER>> She also saves all the processed invoices in a folder, so that she knows what has been processes and is yet to be processed. This is a critical job for ABC corporation. It is mundane and repetitive, but it is critical and takes 10 minutes to process each invoice. On an average Cathy gets 10-15 invoices from multiple vendors every day. Being human Cathy knows that she cannot effort any human errors.
• #11: But to day is not a good day for Cathy. This is the financial year end. And most of the vendors delayed their invoices and she has more than 300 invoices pending. All of them needs to be uploaded to the finance portal in 3 days time. She knows that if each takes 10 minutes, 300 invoices will take her minimum 50 hours to do this. And she cannot afford any mistakes. Moreover, she has a customer interaction at 4:00 PM today.
• #12: But she has a trick on her sleeve. ABC corporation has provided her a digital assistant. The digital assistant, can perform this activity for her. So she summons the Robot residing in her laptop. As you can see in her screen the robot has started processing information. Although you cannot see it has taken up the first email from her mailbox. The robot is also validating the information in the background. It then opens up the company’s finance portal and starts entering the details. What you see is her screen are the actions performed by the robot. It navigates through the pages, fills in data and does auto correction as well; just like how a human would do. In the end, it marks the email as read, sends out the email to the vendor and saves the attachment and the excel file.
• #13: Well, this made Cathy very happy. While her robot is processing the invoices, she connects with the client on time. She enjoys client interactions and wishes to move to a more challenging front office role. So to summarize, you saw how a robotic assistant can make your life easier and better day in and day out. And note that this process also works for any new employee of ABC corporation. To develop this solution, ABC corporation has spent only couple of week’s of development time and now it saves hundreds of hours for the finance department. And now many employees like Cathy focuses on Business and customer.
• #14: I hope all of you got some clarity on RPA and how it makes our life easier. But it is only great, if it is done well. This means how you design your journey, how you re-use every line of the RPA code that you write will determine your success. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel; you just need to add more features to it.
• #15: Lets dive a little bit into how should we design our RPA journey. An RPA robot is not a fancy robot sitting in desk and doing our job; and if you try to look harder only thing you can see is something like this. << PRESS ENTER >> And this robot typically resides in your Laptop, PC and servers. When they are summoned they execute a process. In order to execute the process the robot needs multiple bots or micro bots to work together and perform the task. << PRESS ENTER >>
• #16: To understand what is a bot, we are going to take an example from our IT department. The IT department of ABC corporation has a need to automate disk space issues across all it servers be it Linux, Windows or MAC. In order to achieve this ABC corporation has built many bots to build a botfarm. << PRESS ENTER>> Now note that each of the bots in the form does a specific task, repeatedly again and again without any errors. For example the GET-OS bots job is to find the OS of an appliance be it network, mobile, pc, laptop or a server. << PRESS ENTER>> ABC corporation also has provided the botfarm access to their CMBD, set of business rules and added cognitive capability using Watson, TensorFlow and ABBY. We will talk about these in our next slide. << PRESS ENTER> Lets get back to the flow now. To perform this automation; we will need to first check for disk space , and then triage for which files needs to deleted,. Finally it fixes the disk space issue. << Press ENTER>> So to summarize a bot is a small piece of code which does the same task again and again with an objective. A robot is something that resides in and application who commands and manages the activities of the bots. And the last component is the orchestrator which interacts with other components to execute the business process. Now, that we look at this process, if your organization implements similar process, you can automate the disk space correction once and forever. You just need to change the business rules to modify the functionality and it will work for any number of applicances.
• #17: In our last slide we talked about AI, ML and Cognitive analytics. What role does they play in smart RPA. They actually play a massive roles to make our robots more human. Just like our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin does. It helps our RPA bots to interact with human. <<PRESS ENTER>> Even after implementation of RPA, there is a need for robots to read human. This means if I ask a robot to read Arabic for example, it should be able to read Arabic as well as any other language. This means robots should be able to view images, read documents, understand signs etc. Typical usage is in chatbots. Remember the Uber chat feature? <<PRESS ENTER>> They also need to hear Human.For example, many of us who are familiar with Siri, Alexa and google assistant, when we ask them “Tell me the time” or “What is the time” or “What time is it” or “Quel est le temps” (ku le le ton), it always responds back with current time. Similarly we need our robots to understand that through a phone or through alexa. << PRESS ENTER>> Speak Human. Nobody likes a robot which speaks non-human. So it needs to understand how to talk and write in languages of our choice and should not look artificial. << PRESS ENTER>> They also need to take simple decisions. For example Siri should decide what content to show to whom based on the users personality, behavior patters <<PRESS ENTER>> And it should continuously learn from its mistakes. It should not only correct but adopt to a change. For example, lets imagine our disk space automation example. In that example, do we really need a business rule? What if the robot can learn that everyday we add 8 GB of data and with a storage of 80 GB, it should archive data only in 10 days. If we can add self learning capabilities to the robot, it saves its own time. <<PRESS ENTER>> And the last but not the least, robots should seek human help whenever needed.
• #18: All these translates to these services.
• #26: Questions during Webinar: What do you think will be the future of RPA? Robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue grew 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million, making it the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner expects RPA software revenue to reach $1.3 billion in 2019. And in this market, we are seeing  a massive shift; where Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning are joining hands with RPA to get things done. For example, 2 months back, UIPath has launched their own cognitive package, Automation Anywhere has released their community edition with AI. And I think, it is just the beginning. AI shows what needs to be done and RPA does it.   What are the cost benefits of RPA? RPA brings in faster and quicker ROI, only if implemented well. For example, at Smarterp we always develop keeping future in mind. We don’t re-invent things, once a RPA code is developed, we ensure it is future proof. Today, we may use IBM Watson, but tomorrow if we feel using Google AI, it can be achieved in minutes and not in months. Each development project is scalable to support infinite number of bots, so we are never out of resources. On top of it, before we venture into a RPA project, we ensure that we have baseline the ROI in comparison to conventional automation.   I am interested in RPA and AI. But confused where to start? Our philosophy is to look for low hanging fruits first. And then gradually pick up pace; Crawl, Stand, Walk and then run. So, look for mundane, repetitive tasks in your organization. Trust me as per a recent survey 42% of the IT tasks can be easily automated. And obviously, you can reach out to use for any help that you may need.