Johannesburg, 19 Oct 2022
Enterprise automation is fast penetrating workplaces, supporting workforces by taking on repetitive work, increasing employee satisfaction and boosting productivity and efficiency for organisations around the world. This is according to Michael Law, country manager South Africa at UiPath, who was addressing a roundtable on automation in Durban last week.
According to Law, “enterprise automation has become a boardroom imperative for businesses that want to successfully navigate the current microeconomic landscape. It Is not here to take jobs away but rather to enhance jobs – in much the same way as ATMs did not take away bank jobs, but actually created more jobs in the long term. The facts and figures prove it. The World Economic Forum expects the net increase in jobs due to automation to be 58 million by 2025.”
Software robots developed using a technology called robotic process automation (RPA) take over the tedious and repetitive jobs, he said. “The overwhelming majority of CFOs and financial managers love RPA – coming in, getting the mundane and tedious work done for them. This is also the case in HR, retail and multiple other sectors. However, the most value comes from the end-to-end automation of business processes across the enterprise. An organisation embracing automation will in the longer term achieve value for the organisation and the people who work for the organisation,” Law said.
Law noted: “Over 10 500 organisations globally are now benefitting from the transformative impact of using the capabilities of the UiPath Business Automation Platform, which has seen enterprise-grade advancements in Automation Cloud and Automation Suite. The acquisition of Cloud Elements in 2021 brought advanced API integration capabilities, and the recent acquisition of Re:infer, a natural language processing (NLP) company, added Communications Mining to the platform to unlock the value of the massive amounts of communications data generated by a business each day. Now organisations can analyse e-mails, documents, chat logs, social messages, and more to create actionable business data and new opportunities for automation."
Llewelyn Bennett, senior sales engineer at UiPath, demonstrated Intelligent Document Processing Automation and outlined the end-to-end enterprise automation capabilities of the UiPath Business Automation Platform.
“We need to consider the mistakes, validations, review times and rework times of documents moving through manual processes and the lack of visibility in these processes. When automating business processes , software robots can be used to build in validation actions, alerts and checks. Robots process documents far faster and more accurately,” he said.
Bennett explained the concept of document understanding, saying: “It merges AI, document processing and RPA. Blending machine learning and AI in document processing gives users the ability to understand various document types in the organisation. Once the document understanding model recognizes the document type, it understands the criteria for processing the document.”
Bennett noted that ROI in automation comes from finding the right fit for automation within the organisation. “ROI comes in various forms: time saved, savings, or taking on the mundane repetitive work, so that people can then focus on those tasks that bring most satisfaction and add value to the organisation,” he said.
Low hanging fruit for intelligent document processing include invoices and receipts in finance, onboarding and offboarding in HR, he said. “Onboarding and offboarding is one of the most mundane tasks in HR, and there is always the risk that former employees still have access to company systems. Imagine having a robot that knows a person has been offboarded and goes around removing them from all the systems they once had access to, comes back and produces a report for HR,” he said.
“With intelligent document processing, you can also build your own models and extract unstructured data, such as that found in emails. AI has the ability to learn, understand and consume the data and move forward, getting smarter,” he said.
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