Following the success of Thysia's last webinar in June, the company decided to do it all again with a new webinar on robotic process automation. What is that exactly? Luc Meijs from Thysia explains this together with partner Uipath, who designed the software for this application, and customer Eosta.
Robot-controlled process automation, referred to in short as RPA, does not consist of futuristic robotic arms or self-driving carts in the warehouse. They are software robots that support certain business processes in the background, for example when preparing orders for customers.
Where RPA is sometimes seen as a competitor of BPM, it is actually an important part of BPM, which stands for Business Process Management. The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather reinforce each other, in a complementary capacity, says Luc Meijs of Thysia. "BPM is intended to optimise and, where possible, automate business processes. RPA, in turn, can fully automate parts of that process, saving time and reducing repetitive work for employees.
So how exactly does it work? Luc explains this using the example provided by customer Eosta, importer of organic fruit and vegetables. “Eosta had a number of daily tasks in the office that were repetitive and often prone to errors. Consider, for example, copying over data manually from one system to another to create a sales order. That is work that can be easily automated with RPA. For example, this can reduce the time spent on these tasks from 4 hours a day that people normally spend, to 10 minutes.
“RPA also offers a number of advantages when it comes to the implementation of the software robots within a company. It is easy to adapt and communicate with existing software systems and the robot can adapt to the speed of existing software systems. All in all, this gives the advantage that it is easy to implement within your current application landscape and that the threshold to starting to use it is low due to the low start-up costs. After all, you can start small by automating one task and if you like it, you can let the software robots perform multiple tasks and roll it out more widely in your organisation.”
For more information:
Luc Meijs
Thysia 
Tel: +31 (0) 76 521 88 46
Mob: +31 (0) 76 207 99 66
lmeijs@thysia.eu
www.thysia.eu