What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?

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Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is changing the software world much like how physical robots have changed the world we live in every day.
In this lightboard video, Sai Vennam with IBM Cloud, explains how RPA is helping businesses automate their tedious repetitive tasks by walking through an office use case example, as well highlighting the four things you should look for in an RPA solution.
Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:10 - Defining RPA
0:44 - Where RPA can assist a business use case
2:01 - Extracting data with Optical Character Recognition
3:26 - Benefits of having an intelligent RPA solution
4:18 - Benefits of having a low code environment
4:47 - Benefits of having concurrency support
5:15 - Benefits of having an RPA-as-a-Service solution
6:39 - Summary
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#RPA #RoboticProcessAutomation #AI

[@OpenBots]

Great to hear developers spreading the word of RPA and how it's key to increasing productivity and growth in companies.

[@rajendrajasathy4356]

Nice, good introductory session. Would like to see some introductory on how to begin with rpaframework also.

[@rosscads]

Pete’s getting a promotion! 😃

[@jixster1566]

I did RPA development at my internship. Pretty cool stuff, but the platform I worked with was really buggy. Like how you talked about the importance of using the right tool.

[@Anouddw]

can I ask about which platform you worked on?

[@toenytv7946]

Great one.

[@yoginderkumar2679]

Needed this

[@vijaypathawar]

Excellent explanation 🔥

[@gab882]

Anyone noticed the guy's a freaking genius writing AND drawing backwards and in reverse?

[@IBMTechnology]

Hey there! We shared some backstage "secrets" of how we film our videos on the Community page, check it out here 👉 ibm.co/3h8q61o 😉

[@celesteporche4660]

Yes! The writing backwards was the first thing I noticed. I can't even pay attention to what he is saying because it is so fascinating.

[@sourabhsuri8812]

Thank you for the simplified explanation of the Technology. A couple of questions though - 1) How can OCR, for a start - work around multiple languages, especially ARABIC? Since the dialects are different in every region. 2) How is IPA going to help RPA Grow? 3) Is it right to keep terming it as RPA - when IPA is the new dimension to Automation?

[@warscovich]

That’s a great point! My experience is that Arabic, Chinese and other non Latin characters based languages perform poorly with OCR. I Hope I’m wrong and there is some model out there that I’m not aware of

[@IBMTechnology]

@@warscovich thanks for the great questions! I have answered them each listed below. 1. The OCR engines that IBM RPA natively support (Google Tesseract, ABBYY and Google Cloud Vision) can handle a lot of different languages. Look more information on respective solution pages, ABBYY: www.abbyy.com/finereader-server/specifications/ and GCV: cloud.google.com/vision/docs/languages 2. Yes. RPA is an essential capability for Hyperautomation and Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). 3. At least IBM has been working with intelligent process automation (IPA) for already several years by providing a lot of different business automation capabilities - decision automation, intelligent capture, Watson AI, workflow automation, etc - to establish intelligent automation to your business. RPA is just another component for IPA and hyperautomation. ABBYY ABBYY FineReader Server Specifications & System Requirements Technical specifications of ABBYY FineReader Server (previously Recognition Server): system requirements, supported recognition languages and document formats. www.abbyy.com/media/25150/finereader_server_smm_opengraph_en.jpg Google Cloud OCR Language Support | Cloud Vision API | Google Cloud cloud.google.com/_static/cloud/images/social-icon-google-cloud-1200-630.png

[@mahmoudahmad9756]

We use ABBYY OCR engine in our products and it reaches 90%+ of accuracy for Arabic writing, and since IBM RPA supports ABBYY, I believe you got what you need

[@shashiam]

Thanks for a simple and good explanation of RPA. can you provide some real time scenarios/examples where this RPA can be implemented ? Just wondering why is RPA is important technology?

[@IBMTechnology]

Thanks for the very good question! You can check some RPA use cases here 👉 ibm.co/3fVBcHn In the video description, you can also find more resources about IBM RPA, like the 4th link which contains some more Case Studies. Hope this helps! 🙂

[@LD-wf2yt]

A much better process for addressing 10,000 complaints would be to understand customers needs better and than to provide the right product(s) or service(s).

[@SwaeTech]

Customers will always complain when you scale a company.

[@Mayso45johns]

Is RPA a certification or something? I am interested in becoming one because of the growing field.

[@sydneymorris6019]

Hi Mark! I'm a recruiter for a technical firm! We have a handful of positions available in RPA! Let me know if you're interested.

[@IBMTechnology]

Hi Mark! Thanks for the great question. RPA is one of the Automation tools that uses software robots to automate repetitive tasks. IBM offers certification for RPA developers. We encourage you to sign up. - www.ibm.com/certify/cert?id=C0010800

[@dr.daverobbo2407]

​@ my contribution is a somewhat sad song - 'pull the plug' (it's hypothetical, of course, but hopefully thought-provoking

[@referrme4139]

Can you please tell me weather with RPA process can we give command like , open a cloud tool , navigate to some app in that tool and perform some activity ?

[@edwinfeliz9986]

Yes, you are able to do this with python or any language

[@weslleycesardasilveira8895]

What is screen scraping in the RPA world?

[@warscovich]

How is this different than BPM? I hope is not just a simplified BPM...

[@IBMTechnology]

Hi Julian, thanks for reaching out! So, this is quite a broad question. In brief, where BPM (Business Process Management) is a strategic approach to develop, run, continuously optimize and manage any type of business processes that might span even through different organizations and engage several different user roles, RPA is more tactical solution to automate manual tasks that business users normally do in their own desktop environment using different applications and their user interfaces - like reporting, gathering data from different sources, handling and matching invoices, just to mention few of them. Of course it is not always so black and white, but that’s the main difference. Hope this helps and thanks again for the question!

[@ThilinaRandombage]

Pete extracts data.. ok. He validates the data.. great. He then enters the data to a digital form.. awesome. And then he prints it.. PETE! WTH man. Why did you print it after all that?! (I know.. I know its an example. But it threw me off). Still, its a good explanation.