RPA 2023: Where Are We Going?!

After a somewhat turbulent stretch from 2017-2022, the same question can be asked of RPA, IPA, AI and anything related to transformational automation technologies.

The ascension, awareness, and significant early adoption of automation technology in 2017-2019 era fueled significant growth within the industry.  Like any early adopter technology there were more failures than successes. Shortly after, between 2020 and early 2022, COVID slashed transformation budgets, increased turnover, created a hiring crunch and forced businesses to do whatever they could stay above water from a continuity standpoint.

The second half of 2022 and early 2023 represent the accumulated headwinds of the past few years: companies getting serious about automation at scale.  Recently, both Johnson & Johnson and AT&T shared the successes they are experiencing with their enterprise adoption of RPA, AI and Intelligent Document Understanding.  This proves that the technology does scale if its implemented and supported properly.

With this in mind, I would like to make some predictions for what is in store for 2023:

1. Task Mining, Process Mining, and Task Capture will become imperative to scale and define an enterprise Automation initiative.  With flexible time at a premium for most employees, or a shortage of staff in general, trying to identify and quantify automation opportunities can’t be done without some systematic approach. Traditionally, these bot ideas have been captured using the interview and scope approach.  This can be problematic as the right information is not often communicated effectively and it’s very labor intensive.  That being said, this is fine for companies that want to build a few bots but aren’t ready to scale across the enterprise.

Task Mining can be deployed amongst multiple workgroups and in different parts of the business.  This can help identify workflows that may not necessarily be communicated or realized they existed, especially at high volumes. There has been some hesitancy around the reliability of the tech but with the improvements coming in Q1 of 2023, Task Mining should be ready to fly and meet the expectations of today’s enterprise customers.

Process Mining, especially within UiPath’s enterprise cloud is an excellent Business Process Management solution to clearly identify automation opportunities within the system.  This system can be whatever is defined as a high transaction area in various industries, examples being bank transactions, and insurance claims (healthcare or elsewhere).

2. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) expansion and wide usage will be the #1 use case for 2023. There have been solutions that “worked” but required a lot of support to maintain and didn’t fully live up to their promise.  I am happy to report that today there are solid solutions for structured (Amazon Textract, Google OCR), semi-structured (ABBYY, UiPath Document Understanding) and for unstructured data, (IndicoData).  While they are all at different price points, you can rest assured that high reliability can be achieved at scale depending on the need.

Challenge:

Due to lack of integration between systems, the cumbersome manual Purchase Order process from McKesson Direct into the Basware Invoice Portal was time consuming and error prone. The company was also concerned that this business task impeded scalability as they continued to grow.

As part of this daily process, a Full Time Employee (FTE) previously had to manually log into McKesson Direct and then input many PO transactional line items into the Basware Purchasing module. The Process required manually matching line items between the two systems and then reporting back delivery status and updates into Basware. The manual process for each invoice took approximately 4 minutes and was error prone.