RPA — A Buzz!!

There is a new buzz in Market, RPA(Robotic Process Automation) tools are making a trend shift in the market and by market, I don’t mean the profitability of an organization, I mean the job market! But, let me tell you, this buzz word is half vague, as there are many players in the market and we don’t know for sure which one is the best. Why would I say this? Let me quote a story by CEO and co-founder of UI Path (one of the leading RPA platform) Mr. Daniel Dines, he said that when he started his company after leaving Microsoft, he couldn’t believe that RPA was just a bubble for 6 years because it was targeting only low scale IT companies and the response was not exactly as anticipated during setup period but he decided to hang on for few more years and one fine day he was invited by a company in India to automate their process and, he visited and saw that their product could work in a large scale market and since then he has only seen a massive growth of demand for automation. It is an interesting story for me because being on the verge of failing to become a global leader is quite bizarre, as they didn’t change any products or practices yet they managed to make a trend shift in the way people see process automation. I recently saw came across a bunch of posts that RPA is so easy and it can be easily learned by anyone but my question is what after that? Because in the industry no one is going to hire you for just learning a drag and drop tool with some academic use cases. In reality, process automation is almost equivalent to playing with AI, it does the same process what a person can perform sitting on a chair for n number of hours, just with the right logic, the bot can substitute human repetitive efforts where decision making intelligence is not required in the first place. The process in any organization is usually quite tricky, to name some, data fetching to fill up a form may require pulling data from a system which doesn’t provide all field values and you might have to manipulate those values with few calculations, another one might be platform on which you are running your bots might be unstable or frequent updates may trigger some changes in platform which might lack congruency with your designed bots and there are endless challenges but then also why industries are drolling over it? Because process automation can save millions of dollars if done properly and more importantly it can remove the barrier of 9 AM to 5 PM job, we can schedule bots to run after office hours and improve the efficiency of work by adding more work-time without adding a single employee or over-times. One thing is sure that with practice you become better and this industry is growing rapidly, with open forums and collabs, some industries are partnering and solving real business challenge via the center of excellence and proof of concepts. If you want to break in process automation, start understanding business and how to clearly understand business rules because that is only and the biggest challenge in this industry. Business understanding is not something you gain with experience it is something which is always there inside you, much like your common sense or general IQ. So, this drag and drop tool needs human intelligence to make something magical. In the end, I would like to share one experience, one day I was explaining to my manager that there are few things which are theoretical and few things are practical and then my manager jumped in and said, that I only believe that there is a process magical. Truly said, it looks magical and after effect of this magic is quite quintessential profitable!!