RPA Information

RPA – Robotic Process Automation, starts with “What is RPA” and “What RPA Does” for a business.

Interest in RPA often starts with how software robots can deliver productivity gains for a business.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates traditional manual desktop tasks that are predictable, repetitive, well structured and considered routine. The tasks can be performed on either a scheduled basis, triggered by an event or manually initiated.

For the average office employee there are tedious tasks, like filling in forms, making repetitive calculations, cross checking information with other systems or web sites. These tasks are notoriously error prone and time consuming. Employees often consider such tasks as Boring.

RPA allows these processes to be undertaken by a robotic workforce that is fast, perfectly accurate, tireless, and easily scalable.

The robots are not machines but software programs which simulate the activities that a person would otherwise perform.

RPA Solutions

There are many RPA software products available but Ether Solutions works UiPath as it is widely regarded by the industry analysts as one the leading three vendors.

With UiPath RPA software, tasks that require no human intervention (aka “unattended”) can be performed by software robots. Similarly, tasks can be undertaken alongside people where the software robot works as an assistant (aka “attended”). In both types of operation, the people are released from the manual work and available to perform other activity.

The introduction of RPA processing starts by automating the tasks undertaken by an individual person. Generally the same task is performed by other people alongside the work for the individual. Once the automation of the task has been created, it can be performed by the RPA software robot as many times as required. The same automation can scaled for teams of Robots working continuously day and night, 7 days a week, to complete enormous quantities of work.

Each software robot can only perform one task at a time, so to replace the work of a team of 5 people would require 5 software robots if they worked at the same speed as a person. Typically RPA software robots work at 10 times the speed of a person – you couldn’t type that fast! As software robots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, each robot provides a lot of capacity for work. Depending on any time constraints for the start and end of the tasks being processed, a single software robot operating 24 x7 (168 hours a week), could achieve the same amount of work as a team of 5 (5 x 40 = 200 hours a week) if the software robot can complete each task slightly faster than a person.

As the number of Robots grows, they need to be managed and coordinated. This is achieved through UiPath’s Orchestrator so that priorities, dependencies and errors can be controlled.

Is a process suitable for RPA?

Ether Solutions work with clients to identify tasks that are suitable for Robotic Process Automation in order to determine a balanced use of Robot and human activity.

Developing a Robotic Process Automation business case is an important step in the potential introduction of RPA into an organisation. Ether Solutions typically works with clients on the business case which needs to cover many aspects including:

Do nothing scenario
Current business process effort, volumes and time scales
Costs of RPA implementation
Benefits from RPA
Risks from the introduction of RPA
Quality control from the use of RPA

These business case topics are covered on other pages. A good starting point is the RPA ROI Calculator as this demonstrates the financial aspects to consider.

RPA Services

Ether Solutions provides software robot development using UiPath products to build and deploy an RPA solution. This includes the technical design, the use of development standards, the construction of the software robot logic, the testing of the solution and the deployment of the robots so that they can be utilised on an on-going basis.

Ether Solutions provides an on-going support service to address bug fixes, software upgrades, functional enhancements, etc.