RPA Evolution: From Macros to Hyper Automation

These days everyone is talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the much demanding technology that automates the repetitive routine digital tasks with or without human intervention. For instance, Bank got an email from its customer to know her balance amount. Some one from Bank support team will log into banking application and reply back after getting balance amount by putting customer’s specific information. However, with RPA technology, software has the ability to interact with banking application and reply back to bank’s customers to provide balance amount without human intervention.

RPA evolves dating back from macro to hyper-automation. Let’s have a look of its growing paradigm. In Microsoft Word or Excel, macros are saved sequence of commands that can be recalled with a single command to automate a single task. In computer, a Macro is line of programming instruction that when used, expands into something large. In assembler language, a macro definition defines how to expand a single language statement or computer instructions into a number of instructions.

"In the mid-1950s, when?assembly language?programming was commonly used to write programs for?digital computers, the use of?macro instructions?was initiated for two main purposes: to reduce the amount of program coding that had to be written by generating several assembly language statements from one macro instruction and to enforce program writing standards, e.g. specifying input/output commands in standard ways. ?Macro instructions were effectively a middle step between assembly language programming and the?high-level programming languages?that followed, such as?FORTRAN?and?COBOL" – Wikipedia

Then the era of test automation arises after data scraping and web scraping with extended capabilities to automate user interactions in functional and load testing. In the early 1980s banks began writing data-scraping apps to capture data from various financial data service like Reuters and Quotron. Later, various vendors began building more sophisticated tools to cut and paste data from mainframe terminal apps to more modern web applications. In 1985, AutoTester was the first automation tool for PC and in 1991, Mercury Interactive Corporation (Acquired by HP in 2006) shipped their first automation product. Right now, we have a long list of test automation tools to validate the intended purpose of software applications for instance, Selenium, Appium, JMeter, LoadRunner, Cucumber, TestComplete, Ranorax, IBM Rational Funcational and Performance Tester, Katalon studio, SOAPUI etc.

These scripts written in test automation tools works relatively well when interacting with a single app (think Selenium for web automation), but when it comes to?interacting within multiple applications, things get a lot more complicated. RPA tools differ from such systems in that they allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, receiving?email?containing an invoice, extracting the data, and then typing that into a?bookkeeping?system.

With a bunch of additional variances, RPA coined the term Robotic Process Automation by Blue Prism, a pioneer company founded in 2001. In 2003, Automate was launched as first commercial product. A Microsoft .Net Framework based product can automate any application and support any platform e.g., windows, WPF, JAVA Web et. In 2005, UiPath journey starts from a tiny apartment in Bucharest, Romania with a team of 10 people. The tool was able to intercept clicks, screen scrap forms and send the information to data base and was tested from 2005 to 2011 on tens of millions of computers by customers like IBM, Microsoft and Siemens. Another top-notch name in RPA is Automation Anywhere, in 2003 we built robotic process automation technologies to help eliminate time-consuming tasks. In 2016, Pegasystems announced the acquisition of OpenSpan Inc. that was founded in 2005 and specialized in desktop analytics and desktop automation software that improves the productivity of customer-facing and back-office workers in order to deliver operational efficiency and cost savings, and to enhance the customer experience. Microsoft also rolled out its Power Automate RPA offering in 2019.

Adding more intelligence to automation, it’s not just RPA but its hyper automation that combines other kind of low-code or no-code development tools, BPM tools, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence so that previously un-automatable tasks can be automated. RPA offerings?have struggled with automating processes that involve understanding audio, engaging in conversation, recognizing images, reading documents (capturing text from structured and unstructured documents in contracts, leases and mortgage) and interpreting data from the internet of things. These capabilities involve capturing or ingesting higher-level data abstractions using AI technology. All the major RPA platform vendors are creating AI integration platforms to fill in these gaps. Few of the hyper automation framework impact are in Insurance, mortgage, Banks, Healthcare, manufacturing, Public and Private sectors.