Robotic process automation (RPA) has been well received and is making a significant difference to business processes across organisations.
At its next level, RPA is being enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) to transform business smartly.
This is according to speakers at a roundtable hosted by UiPath in Cape Town, where executives discussed AI, automation the future of work.
Michael Law, country manager at UiPath, told delegates: “RPA alone was last year. It has transformed areas such as finance and HR. UiPath is now bringing AI and automation together across the organisation.”
Law noted: “The 4IR is here, and there’s no going back. The fact is that digital transformation has got C-level attention locally and internationally.”
“At the moment, flexi work is coming in, issues like great resignation and skills shortages are hitting organisations regardless of industry. For example, Australia is looking for over 300 000 IT professionals by 2027. IT and RPA professionals are leaving South Africa for international companies. With this growing skills shortage, organisations are having to look after employees more and more. UiPath has taken an approach of automation for good, which is helping organisations to address some of the challenges they face now,” he said.
Law said automation offered measurable impacts for organisations: “Take Excel away from an organisation, and can it succeed? If you can give a robot to every employee, and the ability to offload the mundane work, you free humans to do more valuable work. For example, one of the world’s largest auditing houses has given every auditor a bot to offload the mundane work, and as a result they are looking to up-bill by almost 30%."
He said this was the e crux of where UiPath was moving. "UiPath has made a move away from focusing on RPA to bring AI and automation together across the organisation, and with our latest acquisition, we are now looking at natural language processing (NLP) too. AI is now embedded across the UiPath automation platform.”
UiPath also aims to address skills shortages by driving its Academic Alliance programme in South Africa. Law explains: “We offer advanced RPA technical training, and plan to bundle all our courses and offer them for free as a module to universities. The programme has had great success globally. To help address the skills shortage in South Africa, we want to get this into high schools and tertiary institutions.”
TFG's learnings
Mo Kola, head of business services at The Foschini Group, outlined TFG’s learnings over three years of working with UiPath.
He said: "The RPA journey needs to start at the top, and having an operating board sponsor for RPA in the organisation. TFG took two specific HR and finance use cases as proof of concepts to the operating board to let them see the art of the possibility with RPA, and were given the go ahead to purchase an RPA tool (UiPath).
“Important for this project’s success was the fact that the head of HR was sponsor of automation. TFG created a Centre of Excellence (RPA COE) ‘hub and spoke model’ with a COE for automation at the hub, and took a multi-party RPA vendor approach.
“From an organisation set up perspective, business champions need to be identified in the organisation who know their respective domains (HR, finance as an example), to review the process opportunities and push out an RPA pipeline for review, assessment and automation.
“RPA should be a business driven accountability, with IT managing the COE from a governance, infrastructure, and architecture perspective. Finance has been one year on the journey, they have automated ten RPA processes, with an average payback of 9.5 months and an ROI of 242%.”
Mo Kola said robotic process automation is something of a mixed-up term. ‘For starters, there are no robots involved (disappointing, but true). RPA use cases for TFG now expand beyond HR, finance and accounting, and into retail, manufacturing, IT and customer use cases.”
TFG also completed their first Internal audit on the RPA software, governance and processes, and it was deemed largely successful, with minor improvements.
Mo Kola shared TFG's vision for 2022 / 2023:
- Know your process, simplify and avoid high complexity (multiple systems) processes.
- 3rd party system integration delays automation & business value / time to market.
- Focus now moves to data privacy, security and improving user experience for RPA in everything we do.
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