Robotic Process Automation

Q&A: What impact does robotic process automation (RPA) have on a company’s operations and competitive positioning?

The impact of Robotic Process Automation on a company’s operations and competitive positioning is significant on a number of fronts: economic value, workforce advantages, quality and control improvements and flexible execution.


What is RPA

The impact of Robotic Process Automation on a company’s operations and competitive positioning is significant on a number of fronts: economic value, workforce advantages, quality and control improvements, and flexible execution. In fact, a couple of RPA’s greatest benefits are often overlooked: its ease of deployment and the speed and agility it confers on the enterprise. But given the inevitable disruption caused by RPA, business leaders should focus on a few key implementation principles: automate as much as possible, focus on frontend processes, maximize productivity, and aim for 100% auditability. RPA can help companies organize themselves for the future. It is a foundation for machine learning, artificial intelligence and a more autonomic enterprise.
 

Selected Citations and References

Registrations

Registering of client’s contract-based employees for health insurance. The robot fills in the internal attendance application with the data from the Employee Agreement report by opening a calendar for each employee and marks the days. If the employee has not been found in the attendance system, it will save it as an exception for manual processing. After the report has been processed, the relevant e-mails are sent with information about the processed units and exceptions with the relevant file formats to the different health insurance companies.

Client data remediation

Address List Processing. The robot processes all address error messages populated in the client’s internal system database application. An initial task is to process erroneous entries and fix or add entries to address lists. The robot goes through unprocessed records from the client’s internal system and processes the record based on the error reported. The robot has access to address lists and adds addresses to them, along with the postal code, which it finds on the web site of National Post public webpages.

Daily Cash Flow

Daily cash flow. The robot processes input data from the State Treasury account statement. Based on predefined parameters (constant symbol, debit / credit, note), it assigns individual movements to the relevant accounts, writes them into individual items and calculates the total amount of turnover into the account. Robot then makes summary calculations for the day in checks to see if the result fits the current account status. It saves the file in a predefined shared directory and sends an e-mail notification at the end of work. Once a month, the robot creates a consolidated cash flow report, stores it in a shared directory and sends it to the appropriate email addresses.

Attendance Control

Employee attendance control. The robot checks the attendance system database for discrepancies. As a next step, the robot sends a copy of the form to the employee, using a structured email with HTML table that the employee fills in and sends back to the robot. The robot analyzes the data sent, checks the maximum number of hours for each absence and corrects the data in the attendance system. As a final step, the robot sends incident summary information to the appropriate email addresses of HR personnel for control purposes.

Client master data validation

Robot scans database with all the information about customers including post addresses and contacts. Robot grabs record per record, scans the information about customer and compare it with updated public web portals. As next step, robot compares latest updated information from public web portals and finds any incorrect data. If the robot has found not matching data, it also does data correction inside of client’s database of customer information. In this way, robot scans entire database and correct any discrepancies record per record so at the end of the run which was set to monthly basis, client’s database about information customers is up to date. As the last step, robot creates a report of every change that was performed.

Ticketing

Manual intervention between internal applications replaced by RPA. Bot first takes data from Salesforce and based on predefined rules decides if data can be processed  locally. If outcome of robot is true, information from Salesforce are being used in another application. Once all information are filled and submitted in second interface , form generates a ticket number, which is being registered back in the Salesforce with additional information. Robot’s significance is in replacement of tedious manual intervention.  

PDF to Salesforce

Robot reads all the data from PDF and uploads them to Salesforce. At the beginning , task is being taken from Salesforce , where robot reads user data and PDF is being downloaded based on particular user. This data were previously recorded by people who were checking their medical condition. When all data were read from PDF , using API are data send back to Salesforce and task is being completed. In case of a failure, task in Salesforce is overwritten to responsible person, that needs manually correct data. 

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Karsten Hegel

Karsten Hegel

Partner, CEE Export Leader, PwC Slovakia

Tel: +421 911 402 630

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