If you think that big businesses use “manpower” in all their departments, you are wrong. Although such companies have thousands of employees, there are many different automation systems running in the background that keep things healthy and orderly. In fact, these systems take over the duties of some departments completely. Automation systems are so advanced and widespread that they are even used in the operation of online casino Canada sites. In this article, we will talk about modern automation systems and explain how they work.
RPA
RPA is the abbreviation of Robotic Process Automation. This is actually quite an old technology; its beginnings go back to the 1990s. You’ve seen how robotic arms assemble car parts at a factory: they work with tremendous speed, cohesion and consistency, right? This is the most primitive version of RPA. In other words, it means automating a certain action by executing orders given to a robot.
However, nowadays RPA covers more than that, and this definition also includes “software robots.” You can program a mechanical robot using software, but you can do the same thing to create a “software robot.” This type of robot can read a form on the screen, understand its content, can be programmed to type a specific thing in a specific section and even find & extract certain data on forms. Let’s give a few simple examples:
- An RPA robot can match invoices coming from different channels with purchase orders within seconds and send information about the payments to be made to the accounting department.
- An RPA robot can quickly scan the resumes of hundreds of job applicants to identify only those who have graduated from a particular department of a particular university.
- An RPA robot can keep inventory records by tracking various products from multiple regions and automatically notify the purchasing department when it’s time to place an order when these are running low.
We can multiply examples: RPA robots can track payrolls, determine what tax you will pay and even ensure that customer complaints are transferred to the right departments. Of course, these are things that humans can do too, but RPA systems can do it all much faster, more efficiently and without errors.
Intelligent Automation
At first glance, you might think that intelligent automation and RPA systems are the same things because robotic automation is the basis of both. However, intelligent automation also includes artificial intelligence (AI) in this process. Although RPA systems can do pretty impressive things, they are not “intelligent”. They cannot make decisions on their own: they just do what they are programmed for. Let’s go back to the example above: in an automobile factory, are the robotic arms that assemble the parts “smart”? They do what they are programmed to do with excellent efficiency, but they do not have the ability to analyze what they are doing and determine how it can become more efficient. Intelligent automation, on the other hand, fills this gap: it both does what it is programmed to do and “thinks” about how to do it better. Here are a few examples to illustrate how it works:
- We saw how intelligent automation systems were used in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 vaccine research. Developing a vaccine requires thousands of different equipment calibrations and product measurements. Almost every laboratory used intelligent automation systems in this process. These systems automatically determined the new calibration settings and product quantities to be used by seeing what worked and what did not. RPA robots could only automatically generate a detailed list of methods that worked and those that didn’t. Intelligent automation, on the other hand, both created that list and automatically made the necessary changes to that list.
- Let’s give another example from the healthcare industry: an RPA robot might know which departments to forward customer complaints to. However, intelligent automation systems can understand how serious a complaint is and decide whether it should be reported directly to the manager of a department. “Decision making” is the key difference here: RPA robots are not capable of making any decisions on their own.
- We can give an example from the automotive industry too. Robot arms using RPA systems know how to move and where to weld. Intelligent automation systems, on the other hand, determine how multiple arms should act in order to work faster and more efficiently. In other words, they enable robot arms to “cooperate”.
Hyper-Automation
Hyper-automation, on the other hand, looks like an idea straight out of sci-fi movies. It is basically a technology used to automate the internal bureaucracy of huge corporations, and we’re not exaggerating when we say “automatic”. Hyper-automation is a system based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: bots developed for different purposes collect data, and artificial intelligence uses this data to make everything work much more efficiently.
In this respect, we can say that hyper-automation is a general term that covers both RPA and intelligent automation systems. Although it covers both of these, it offers much more. It will be clearer what we mean if we give some examples of what hyper-automation systems can do now and in the near future:
- Hyper-automation can analyze data from all departments in a company and reveal which ones are performing well and which are performing poorly. RPA systems can also do this, but hyper-automation also determines how the problems it detects can be solved. For example, it may warn you that you are over-buying a certain product, or it may analyze the financial markets and tell you which product would be a better investment to stock up on. This alone will allow you to manage your inventory much better.
- Hyper-automation can cooperate with another company’s hyper-automation system to prepare a purchase agreement that will be advantageous for both parties and deliver it to you for signing. Normally, you would have to spend days and seek help from different departments to find that company and prepare the best contract possible. Hyper-automation systems, on the other hand, can do this in minutes.
Frankly, hyper-automation is the future of almost every industry and offers incredible potential. These systems can enable any company to operate more efficiently and generate more profits. They can help you make critical decisions and even make some of these decisions for you if you want. In short, hyper-automation technology is the future of all automation systems.
