Leveraging RPA to Drive Digital Transformation

What happens when Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are combined?

In our January edition of Talking Tech, Senior Solutions Architect Kolitha Gunaratne explores how Intelligent Automation solves many modern-day technology transformation issues, while accelerating development cycles.

Leveraging RPA to Drive Digital Transformation

Speed and accuracy are the primary drivers of RPA and IA. As a result, organizations continue to reap significant benefits by using these levers to optimize processes and drive digital transformation efforts. However, a complete transformation also demands a shift in culture, where innovation and emerging technology are adopted to enhance user experiences and boost productivity.

A few areas where a company can leverage RPA solutions, include:

• Automation of data validation – An organization’s sheer volume of data makes manual validation cumbersome and error-prone. Data is invaluable to organizations and maintaining data accuracy and quality is a high priority during transformation projects. Through bots or AI, this process can be simplified and accelerated. Automation can be used in the data cleansing process to identify and fix inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent data, while post-validation checks will determine the usefulness of data.

• Push/pull data from EDI systems – RPA solutions can be used to seamlessly integrate with ERP, e-commerce and other external systems to transfer business documents between trading/business partners/banks in a standard format. This brings a host of benefits, including eliminating the use of paper, cutting down manual data entry, and faster document processing.

• Excel automation/Manipulation of macros – MS Excel-based tools are used for many repetitive backend tasks like data import and export, extraction, migration, validation, etc. Using bots to perform these repetitive and time-consuming tasks will allow business users to spend more time analyzing reports and making critical business decisions.

RPA can also be used in decision management, interacting with web services (REST/SOAP), invoice/PO (document) classification, extracting data from unstructured documents, integrating legacy systems and secure wallets for application credentials.

Using Automation to Integrate Salesforce with Dynamics 365 to Improve the Sales Process

In this particular use case, the UiPath-based RPA Solution automatically collects new customer contracts from Salesforce and stores them in Microsoft Dynamics 365. This automation not only helped improve accuracy by 99%, but also reduced the cycle time by 100%.

Noteworthy solution features, include:

• A fully automated process which automatically stores new customer contracts created in Salesforce in Dynamics 365;
• Integration of two ERP systems using connectors and APIs; and
• Inputs from the UiPath Salesforce connector and UiPath Orchestrator to trigger two on-demand processes.

Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence – A Collaboration?

Intelligent Automation is a combination of RPA and Artificial Intelligence. This collaboration of AI technologies such as machine learning and fuzzy logic, and workflow automation and bots can help overcome complex business problems and automate end-to-end business processes.

91% of organizations are engaged in some form of digital initiative, according to Gartner. In addition, AI and machine learning are placed within the top seven in-demand technology skills in digital transformation. In this context, Intelligent Automation has the potential to optimize business processes and free up resources for more important strategic work.

For example, adopting Fortude’s Ui Path-based Purchase Order processing solution can help eliminate the tedious and time-consuming of task processing and validating purchase orders. The solution can read and understand purchase orders (POs) from different vendors and templates. When the bot comes across unrecognizable purchase orders, it will alert a human for validation. The UiPath solution will then use human input to train the bot further. Finally, the bot will use the trained data to process similar POs next time, without human intervention.

Tap into the Potential of Intelligent Automation

Fortude has implemented multiple RPA and IA solutions to improve its customers’ business processes:

1. Trade Spend Process
2. Inventory Reconciliation
3. Update the Estimated Vessel Departure Dates in Infor M3
4. PO Processing with IA
5. Integrate SalesForce with Dynamics 365

Click here to learn more about how Fortude’s RPA and IA solutions can accelerate your digital transformation journey.

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