DVT has partnered with robotic process automation (RPA) supplier Automation Anywhere, offering software bots that enable customers to automate their business processes end-to-end.
RPA is a form of software automation that emulates a user to effectively automate business processes.
Futhi Luthango, practice head: AI, data and analytics at DVT, says Automation Anywhere’s comprehensive RPA toolkit makes it easy for business users to get the full benefit of RPA without needing extensive technical skills or experience.
“One of the reasons we have partnered with Automation Anywhere as an RPA solution provider is ease of use,” says Luthango. “They give our clients all the tools they need to create an end-to-end RPA system without needing any third party tools or applications, and their tools are cloud based, so companies can scale up quickly and easily.”
DVT has already implemented RPA in its own business, using bots to generate client invoices.
With Automation Anywhere, RPA bots serve as virtual employees, with their own user IDs and email addresses, allowing them to perform tasks and interact with a company’s business system as if they were actual employees.
The main benefits are error reduction, time and cost savings; tasks that would take teams of people days to complete – like generating hundreds of invoices – can be done in a day once the RPA bot is set up to do so.
“Several business processes in an organisation still rely on human intervention to conclude repetitive and mundane tasks. Implementing Intelligent Automation helps companies to effectively deploy human resources to do insightful and creative jobs while ‘Bots’ can take over mundane and repetitive tasks,” says Milan Sheth, executive vice-president: IMEA at Automation Anywhere.
Automation Anywhere takes RPA a few steps further with some important features, like IQ Bots and Bot Insights, as well as providing a centralised, secure control room to manage the RPA system.
IQ bots use computer vision, a form of AI, to work with unstructured data. For example, different companies use different formats on their tax invoices. IQ Bots can identify and use specific information on an invoice, such as total amount, invoice number, date and so on, regardless of where it appears on the invoice, and use that information to execute different tasks.
BOT Insights allow users and management teams to interrogate the data generated by bots. For example, you can have different bots generating different types of invoices, then use Bot Insights to see the actual monetary value of those invoices, either collectively or by bot. This helps differentiate between operational and business intelligence insights – the bot created 200 invoices (operational) with a value of R2 million (BI), for example.
“The Automation Anywhere control room gives technical managers complete security and management control to manage their company’s bot environment,” says Luthango. “RPA doesn’t replace the need for more advanced technical staff and skills in the business, but rather frees up business users to do higher value tasks while letting software bots quickly and accurately take care of repetitive, predictable functions.”