Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a booming field right now. Often referred to as “Swivel Chair” software, RPA does not refer to a physical robot, but instead is an easily programmable inter-application functionary.
Imagine an office assistant who is given the task to find last year’s sales numbers for an item your company produces. You’d also like to know industry sales numbers for last year that are available on your trade group’s website, and how your sales compare to the average.
If your last year’s sales numbers are squirreled away on a legacy mainframe or stand-alone spreadsheet, an RPA can be easily programmed to open your legacy data, scrape the relevant data to a new spreadsheet, then open the trade group website, locate the correct data and scrape that, download it into the created spreadsheet, and then calculate sales ratios.
While it might take a human an hour or more to perform this process, once programmed, an RPA can do it in seconds–not just today, but next month, next year, as many times as you need.
The “swivel chair” refers to when a human assistant would have to swivel around to open a drawer to remove a file.
While RPA is absolutely fun to watch, and almost magical seeming, it is not a future-oriented business process solution. In practical use it can be a backward-looking hack. If you remember the concept of macros from early Macintosh and Windows computer operation, RPAs are just inter-application macros.
The great thing about RPAs is that they are here, and work, now. This is not a “someday” or “horizon” technology. RPA serves as a bridge between old, inefficient systems and new lightning fast applications. Every business should be using RPAs to increase efficiency.
If you are just starting a business you hope will grow, we would recommend that you structure all your data in an efficient way to begin with, ideally using a small enterprise system that is easily up and out-scalable.
You may not be ready for Oracle or SAP yet, but you want to be prepared for when you are.