Understanding the Usage of Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) to Eliminate Repetitive Manual Computer/System Operations

Johnny is an accountant, and he has been working in a non-governmental organization for eight years. 

Timothy is an accountant too, and he has been working in a local trading firm for four years.

Both Johnny and Timothy are eager to learn and apply information technology and computer skills to their daily accounting practices. They took the same IT short course two years ago. 

One day, they met each other in a café coincidentally. Here are their conversations about robotic processing automation (RPA):

Johnny: Hi, Timothy. Long time no see!! Do you still remember me? I am Johnny. We took the same VBA programming course two years ago.

Timothy: Hey, Johnny. I do remember you. We were the only accountants attending that programming course. 

Johnny: Ha ha ha, you have a good memory!  How are you and how is your journey of VBA programming with Excel?

Timothy: I am fine, thank you. My programming journey is good too. I assisted my company’s billing department to develop some automated functions with Excel. My colleagues love these functions a lot as they can save a lot of time in preparing sales invoices and consolidating sales data from different spreadsheet files. Let me share with you - I have been promoted to assistant accounting manager recently! I am now responsible for exploring how to improve my department’s operational efficiency by eliminating any unnecessary, repetitive and manual computer operations.

Johnny: Wow, such a wonderful and fruitful journey! Congratulations on your promotion!!  It should be a recognition of your contributions, isn’t it? Have you heard about robotic process automation (RPA)? This may be one of the important ways that you may consider to eliminate unnecessary, repetitive and manual computer operations within your company.

Timothy: Ha-ha, thank you so much for the appreciation. I heard the term RPA once from my company’s freelance programmer He mentioned that it is a similar Excel “Macro” function which can control different types of software and webpages systematically. We can use RPA software to record a series of computer operations, such as mouse clicks and keystrokes of a software application, for a specific task. The RPA software can then run the recorded computer operations step by step automatically and systematically when we want to perform that specific task once again. This is what I know, am I correct?

Johnny: Well, it is partially correct. The function that you just mentioned is only the application recorder function of RPA. RPA is more powerful and has many other functions. I It can be linked with different technologies, such as optical character recognition (OCR), cloud-computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and many more. I attended a one-day RPA workshop last month, and a speaker shared about her experience of using RPA. Do you have time and interest to hear about her case?

Timothy: Sure, please.

Johnny: The speaker was the regional CFO of an international retail chain. Before implementing RPA, each store manager of her company was required to upload daily sales data to a dedicated cloud-based server by 10pm every day. As you know, store managers might take a leave or forget about this task with different reasons, so it was common that sales data could not be totally collected from all the stores every day. In order to compile a complete daily sales summary report for all the stores, her team needed to spend at least an hour each day in collecting the missing daily sales data from different stores with a remote desktop function over the Internet. The CFO and her company’s IT team tried to explore different technologies to solve this issue effectively, and they finally selected and adopted RPA two years ago. Store managers do not have to upload sales data manually to the dedicated server every day any more. Daily sales data are now automatically generated from each store’s POS system, and uploaded to the dedicated server by an RPA function. Two other RPA functions were also developed for reporting data transmission status among all the stores and importing daily sales data to a specific database automatically and systematically.  With these RPA functions, her team saves a great deal of time in handling sales data every day - they spend only 15 to 20 minutes but not two to three hours! Her case has inspired me a lot in designing my first RPA project for my work.

Timothy: It sounds fantastic. How about your project?

Johnny: With the support from my boss and the IT department, I have developed an RPA function to collate monthly income and expenditure statements among 26 service centers in a row from my organization’s ERP system. Without this RPA function, I need to take about two hours each month to generate these statements, save them one by one into a specific folder, and then double check the files to ensure that there is no missing or duplicate statement. I am now designing another RPA function to combine all the figures from these monthly income and expenditure statements into a spreadsheet file, so I can do analysis on the income and expenditure items among these 26 service centers with one spreadsheet file only.

Timothy: Wow, these projects are amazing and very practical. Is RPA software difficult to learn and use? Does RPA require a lot of programming techniques?

Johnny: RPA software is surprisingly easy to learn and simple to use. You don’t need to have sound technical knowledge on the system. Apart from the application recorder function, we need to understand some common built-in RPA actions, such as launching an application, opening a file, reading a value from a file, writing a value to a file, and creating valuables, but they are all not complicated. According to my understanding, many RPA software providers are adopting a low-code approach or even a no-code approach. RPA functions are usually created with flowcharts, rather than multiple blocks of commands and parameters. Be honest, I have more confidence to build an RPA function with a flowchart. After all I am an accountant but not a full-time programmer, I am not good at reviewing all the commands block by block. In my projects, RPA actions are added to a flowchart by a mouse drag-and-drop function or an application recorder function. Commands are only used for transforming a value from one format or data type to another one, or combining multiple values together in a specific format. Isn’t it handy to use?

Timothy: Yea! It seems that RPA software is user-friendly. Hey, have you enrolled in other RPA workshops or events in the coming months? Can I join any of them with you?

Johnny: There will be another one-day RPA workshop in April, the topic is about how to develop an RPA function to read documents and retrieve data automatically with OCR, AI and machine learning technologies. Let me share the details with you.
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Nowadays, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Microsoft Power Automate and UiPath are popular RPA software in the market.

For details, you can read the following articles:
1. What is robotic process automation? - UiPath
https://www.uipath.com/rpa/robotic-process-automation

2. How Does RPA Work? - Blue Prism
https://www.blueprism.com/guides/robotic-process-automation-rpa/#14

3. Why businesses are embracing RPA tools? - Microsoft Power Automate
https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/rpa-tool/

4. What Does No-Code Mean? - Automation Anywhere
https://www.automationanywhere.com/rpa/no-code-automatio

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About the author

CHENG Ka Chun Chris, Senior Lecturer, Department of Accountancy, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.