RPA Life-Cycle & Costs

RPA and AI have been making waves in the business world for its ability to automate repetitive and routine tasks, improving efficiency and reducing errors. Now, with new technologies, you have to understand and adapt. You also need to keep an eye on ROI and make sure your costs don’t escalate. Let’s look at the RPA life-cycle.

Stages:

The RPA Life-Cycle consists of several stages: Planning, Development, Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance.

During the planning stage, businesses identify the tasks and processes that are suitable for automation and determine the resources and expertise needed to support the implementation of RPA.

  • The development stage involves creating the RPA solution, which may include designing and building bots, integrating systems, and training the RPA system.
  • The testing stage involves testing the RPA solution to ensure that it is functioning correctly and meets the needs of the business. The deployment stage involves rolling out the RPA solution to the live environment and making it available to users.
  • The maintenance stage involves ongoing monitoring and management of the RPA solution to ensure that it continues to function properly and meets the needs of the business.

Costs:

  • Planning: Enterprises may spend a significant amount of time and resources during the planning stage of the RPA Life-Cycle to ensure that they have a clear understanding of their automation goals and the resources and expertise needed to support the implementation of RPA. Autosmic helps to shorten this stage with Automated Task Mining and Process Modeling capabilities.
  • Development: The development stage may also require a significant investment of time and resources, as it involves designing and building the RPA solution, integrating systems, and training the RPA system. With a screen activity recorder and a drag and drop cloud designer, you can work pretty quickly through this phase.
  • Testing: Ensuring that the RPA solution is functioning correctly and meets the needs of the business is critical, and may require a significant investment of time and resources during the testing stage. Having the right amount of test data available and testing various exception scenarios is important at this stage.
  • Deployment: The deployment stage may also require a significant investment, as it involves rolling out the RPA solution to the live environment and making it available to users. If you have deployment tools, that simplify your deployment and management, this phase can be quick.
  • Maintenance: Ongoing monitoring and management of the RPA solution to ensure that it continues to function properly and meets the needs of the business is important and may require a significant investment of time and resources during the maintenance stage of the RPA Life-Cycle. Monitoring is an on-going activity and having the visibility through the tool-set is very important. Similarly if an application changes, bots may need to be maintained. Allowing this process to happen as smoothly as possible is a big factor that determines how hard and expensive your maintenance cycles are going to be. Autosmic provides special features for this stage.

Overall, the specific amount of time and resources that enterprises spend on each part of the RPA Life-Cycle will depend on the specific needs and goals of the enterprise, as well as the complexity and scope of the RPA implementation. Autosmic simplifies the journey by providing tooling at all stages of RPA. We would be happy to help guide you on your journey. Get in touch

Streamlining Healthcare Operations with AUTOSMIC RPA

Introduction:

Healthcare organizations face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing operations. From managing electronic health records and scheduling appointments to processing insurance claims, there is a constant flow of administrative tasks that need to be completed efficiently and accurately. However, these tasks can be time-consuming, error-prone, and costly, leading to inefficiencies and frustration for both healthcare providers and patients. Fortunately, there is a solution: Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

HealthCare Automation

Solution:

RPA is a technology that enables organizations to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks that are typically performed by humans. By using software “robots” to perform these tasks, RPA can significantly improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors. Here are just a few examples of how RPA can solve operational challenges in the healthcare industry:

  • Electronic health records: RPA can quickly and accurately enter data into electronic health record systems, eliminating the need for manual data entry and the risk of errors. This can improve the accuracy of patient records and reduce the time required to maintain them.
  • Appointment scheduling: RPA can automate the appointment scheduling process, including checking for availability, sending reminders to patients, and updating schedules. This can improve the efficiency of the scheduling process and reduce the risk of errors.
  • Insurance claims processing: RPA can automate the entire insurance claims process, including extracting data from claims, verifying the information, and routing the claims for approval. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required to process claims and improve accuracy.

Conclusion:

In summary, RPA can be a powerful tool for solving operational challenges in the healthcare industry. By automating repetitive, rule-based tasks, RPA can free up healthcare providers to focus on patient care and improve the overall patient experience. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your operations and improve efficiency, consider implementing RPA in your organization.

How AUTOSMIC RPA Solves Your Operations Nightmare

Problem:

Does your organization struggle with inefficient, error-prone, and time-consuming administrative tasks? Are you looking for a way to streamline your operations and improve efficiency? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations face these challenges, but fortunately, there is a solution: Autosmic’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Don’t let your operations overwhelm you. Stream-line your operations.

Autosmic’s Solution:

Process Discovery can help make bubble up data based opportunities that safely predict ROI for Automation

RPA is a technology that enables organizations to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks that are typically performed by humans. By using digital assistants to perform these tasks, RPA can significantly improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors. When you combine Process Discovery with RPA, you get a more predictable and calculated outcome. Use these tools to drive decision making and manage your Automation Projects well. Automation is delivered in the form of Digital Assistants.

Here are just a few examples of how Autosmic’s Intelligent RPA can solve operational challenges:

  • Data entry: Digital Assistants can quickly and accurately enter data into various systems, eliminating the need for manual data entry and the risk of errors that can occur when humans perform this task.
  • Invoice processing: Digital Assistants can automate the entire invoice processing workflow, including extracting data from invoices, verifying the information, and routing the invoices for approval. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required to process invoices and improve accuracy.
  • Customer service: Digital Assistants can handle routine customer service inquiries, freeing up human customer service agents to focus on more complex or high-priority issues. This can improve response times and customer satisfaction.

Use Cases that Autosmic’s platform can help with:

Finance and accounting: Automate tasks such as data entry, invoice processing, and reconciliation of accounts.

Human resources: Automate tasks such as employee onboarding, benefits enrollment, and the creation of employee records.

Supply chain and logistics: Automate tasks such as tracking shipments, updating inventory levels, and generating reports.

Healthcare: Automate tasks such as managing electronic health records, scheduling appointments, and processing insurance claims.

Manufacturing: Automate tasks such as monitoring production processes, tracking inventory levels, and generating reports.

Retail: Automate tasks such as price monitoring, updating product information, and processing orders.

Conclusion:

In summary, Autosmic Intelligent RPA can be a powerful tool for solving operational challenges and improving efficiency. By automating repetitive, rule-based tasks, you can free up human workers to focus on more value-added activities and reduce the risk of errors. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your operations and improve efficiency, contact us for a free evaluation for your organization.

OCR – A Necessary Evil?

How paper-work started

Many businesses interact with their end customer or partner or other business entities over several different communication channels. The oldest one was snail mail where people would mail their paperwork, then we got the phone system, later came email and the web. However the paper that once existed has not gone away. People just found new ways to use the paper to scan and upload over email or scan and upload to a web page.

The Last Mile

There are couple ways to eliminate the paper-work and both rely on electronic means to capture the data from the end user. There is the traditional web portal approach, where a web form captures the data and then there is the messaging/chatbot approach also known as conversational AI. There are some differences in the approach and also some pro/cons (probably a topic for another time)

Why don’t we fix the problem?

Lethargy and a fragmented approach to solutions has created a situation, where OCR (although not perfect) continues to be used overwhelmingly for automaton. Instead of preventing the problem, we exacerbate the problem by letting people continue to scan paper documents into images and then OCR them back (in the process, struggling to find the best OCR technology, which will fix all the legibility issues, the hand written text and so on)

Conclusion

OCR is not going away soon. But the process can be hastened by adopting electronic means of onboarding, for example. Autosmic provides a Multi-Portal which is a multi-tenant portal customizable for different needs and pre-hooked into the RPA infrastructure, so automation is pre-integrated into it. This allows people to focus on the business problem to be solved and not the infrastructure complexity or the plumbing!

What Breaks Your Bots ?

You might have heard this from others, or experienced it first hand. RPA bots keep breaking every few weeks. While this may be the experience of many, I had a different experience with what I built with Autosmic. I think this problem people see is a function of a few different factors:

  1. The problem you are solving may involve applications that change a lot
  2. The way the bots were built, made them prone to the application changes
  3. The RPA technology you use uses object detection technology that relies on underlying application page changes

Naturally, you wonder, how does one make the bots resilient?

  1. First of all, you got to understand what kind of changes you are likely to see. For example, a web application from a cloud provider you have no control over, can change in whatever way they want it to (of course most of them are not going to do a UI re-design every month!). Based on that, there are a variety of techniques you can use to build your bot
  2. RPA is a skillset that needs to be acquired over some time. Similar to programming, if the RPA developer uses correct techniques and relies on more robust unchanging entities, bots won’t break often.
  3. With Autosmic, we use computer vision to eliminate page/html changes beneath the hood. We don’t want those changes to inadvertently break our bots. The result is that if the pages are visually unchanged, mere html changes don’t affect the bots. In addition, if the objects do shift around, that can be accommodated as well.
How Do You Fix The Broken Bot?

Assuming this was a change in the web application that caused the visual navigation to break, you may end up re-recording the bot and building and testing it all over again.

With Autosmic, the bot is able to recognize the change on the fly, allow you to provide corrective guidance and it fixes itself while in the flow of execution, and continues as if nothing went wrong. You avoid the entire re-building and testing process. This feature can be enabled or disabled, of course as needed.