What is Robotic Process Automation? What can robots do in the purchase-to-pay process? Can a robot also enter data from an Excel into SAP? What does RPA cost? Some of the questions RPA expert Martin van Esschoten answered during a webinar organized by ICreative in collaboration with Coforce Robotic Process Automation.
It is a fact that robots are making their appearance in the office environment. Robotization is a threat to jobs on the one hand, but it also offers opportunities on the other. 'But isn't that actually always the case with change? Circumstances change and people adapt to it,' Danny Kind wondered aloud in his introduction and answered in the same breath.
'With all kinds of disruptive technologies, we see that work has changed, but it has not led to more structural higher unemployment.'
He backed up his argument with some numbers. According to a World Economic Forum report, 133 million jobs will be created by robotization over the next five years. While 75 million will disappear, the difference is still 58 million jobs that will be added. That just requires different skills. It has been calculated that 54 percent of the current workforce will need to learn new skills before 2022, especially in places where human competencies are important. So people have to change with it to stay relevant," Child said.
Van Esschoten then took over, gave a general explanation of how a robot works and how a robot can be configured. 'Real robots cannot be configured in five minutes, as I showed in the demonstration. Rather, that's several days because you have to think about a lot of elements. You have to think out every step. Thinking about what could possibly go wrong, whereas an employee would understand this because of his cognitive function,' Van Esschoten paints a realistic picture.
Specialty application or robot?
Next, van Esschoten focused on the purchase-to-pay process. One audience member raised the question of what operations a specialized purchase-to-pay, or trade application, can perform and when you let a robot do something. Retrieving invoices, standard coding based on predefined logic, or creating new suppliers are good examples. 'Subject applications themselves are getting smarter and moving more and more toward a touchless process. Basware Alusta is a good example of this. So the role RPA can play is different for each organization.'
Another listener asked if robots can also be used in an SAP environment to enter data from an Excel into a particular transaction? Van Esschoten replied that this scenario is very common. 'Yes, a robot can read an Excel and if it is structured, extract the right data from it and then perform the right operations in SAP and use the data from that Excel file. We call this a markup robot.'
Robotics ready
For implementing a robot in the organization, Coforce has developed an implementation model consisting of five steps. After an inventory of which processes are all suitable for robotization, the process once chosen must then be made 'robotics ready'. 'You can see the robot as a virtual employee, which is actually very dumb. RPA currently only performs things that do not require intelligence. It involves repetitive actions without any interpretation. If you get someone like that on your team, you have to provide input in some way and start looking closely at the expected output. The finance manager must therefore always be able to take responsibility, on the one hand for what actually happens in what I call his "transaction factory" and on the other hand for formulating business objectives and being a partner in that," Van Esschoten said.
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