Page 13 - IFV_Issue 8_2022

Business

as resident data jockeys, guiding and
mending the business processes with
short-term fixes and inadvertently
creating a precedent of what they
regard as acceptable practice,
acceptable turnaround times and
acceptable service levels.” customers and suppliers can engage “One could also link to legacy or
Is this intentional? Definitely not. with the enterprise in an efficient, external systems in a non-intrusive
The sheer volumes of repetitive timely and cost-effective manner. manner that would otherwise be too
manual tasks leave the expert with Maistry says that Robotic Process cost prohibitive to integrate into one’s
little time to stop, think and act. It Automation is the answer. “RPA tools internal business process, or avoid
is very possible that the business offer potential ways to automate major systems re-engineering for the
process has not been electronically repetitive, manual, rules-based tasks. purpose of integrating or automating
orchestrated due to the nature of the Whilst RPA is not the answer to all part of a business process,” he
process e.g. multiple decision point automation conundrums within the comments.
inputs - or it could be cost-prohibitive enterprise, it does offer a compelling If there is a requirement to have
to use some sort of middleware or alternative to traditional BPM tools.” a speedy, cost effective, error-free,
BPM tool to integrate the process. Instead of months-to-years to repeatable automation of business
Notwithstanding, any brownfields automate business processes within processes, then RPA should be a
digital transformation initiative is going the enterprise, RPA can achieve similar consideration. More so, if there is a
to be dependent on having optimised results within weeks-to-months. requirement to transition knowledge
business processes, preferably The earliest versions of RPA workers tackling mundane and routine
digitised. This will surely remove all technologies were primarily anchored tasks, to become an integral part of
friction in the system, ensuring that in screen scraping technology – which the digital transformation journey.
allowed a software ‘robot’ to mimic user
interactions. However, RPA technology
has evolved significantly since then.
Today, RPA vendor, UiPath, offers a
host of ‘out of the box’ user interface
interaction, integration and descriptor
technologies that can be configured
to mimic business processes in an
attended (user monitored, controlled
and interfaced) or unattended (‘lights-
out’) mode. This allows one to create
a team of virtual workers that operate
24/7, executing error-free, repeatable
business processes.
Apart from reducing manual
interventions in repeatable
business processes, one can use the
technology to reduce the headcount
in batch-driven data input and output
processes.

The Villager • Issue 8 2022 • 11