Digital economy is drastically removing barriers to entry into markets. This highly disruptive market is creating opportunity for finance professions; plan, track and execute strategy to ensure goals are met, manage performance, support effective risk management and decision making.
In the contemporary business environment, businesses need to react and quickly adapt to stay in the game. Finance teams must ensure they are involved in activities that add value to business as finance professions can help companies assist in risk management. By deploying robotics i.e. automation, the finance team can be utilized into areas of higher concentration-needs to be able to assist companies to make more informed decisions.
Robotics is a software that automate high volume repetitive rule based tasks. It replicates and perform exact processes that human user would action essentially to save time by executing them at faster speed and allocate this time for users to focus on value adding activities i.e. support in decision making tasks.
SEN PI consulting has been able to automate tasks that deal between modules of different ERP systems that would typically need human interference. We do this by understanding software used by corporations and record human action to them and then repeat it using our software that has learnt human movements. Example: we implemented stamp marks on PDF documents to authenticate document authorization that were output from SAP ERP system i.e. stamps on journal entries to show document were inspection in hierarchy order that was as per bylaws of company.
Robotics Process Applications. Attended RPA’s are simple solutions where softwares are deployed to individual desktops. These are desktop recorders simply records the action and key strokes of human users. This script is then saved and can be played and paused when needed. These are more like Macros that are typically found in Microsoft Excel but these can interact with any application. There are unattended RPA’s that are more scalable as these are server based run in background i.e. installed on virtual machines rather than individual desktop. Basic comparison are below:
Difference between traditional automation and robotics automation ?
-Integration to underlying system
Robotics sits on top of existing applications, does not require changing existing software.
Traditional automation requires modifying existing application or through API -Application Programming Interface which is only welcomed if the applications supports it.
-Compatibility issues
API is restricted to various environment limitations such as operating system. Whereas robotics is standalone and independent of other environment upgrades.
-Complexity
Its convenient to upgrade/modify robotics applications. API programming requires a lot of programming of different source codes relating to different software. However not to forget that API ensures more security but this does not mean we cannot limit compromise on robotics applications.
In choosing between API integration or RPA integration the issues to consider include:
• The availability of the API / source code to facilitate integration in the first place, some languages are outdated or no longer supported by other dependencies that have been upgraded.
• The licensing and operating cost of connecting through APIs versus similar RPA costs (cost-benefit analysis)
• How quickly the automation fix needs to happen
• The complexity and business criticality of process automation
• The likelihood of significant on-going system application changes or a future system upgrade – in such cases, APIs will generally be a better option as RPA can be more vulnerable to changes in the underlying systems in terms of reprogramming.
Source Used: “Embracing Robotic Automation During the Evolution of Finance,” Sept. 2018. A report by ACCA and CA ANZ in collaboration with KPMG.”