28 February 2017

Automation Anywhere – the Death of Copy and Paste?

If Control-C and Control-V are key sequences you execute for much of your working time, you may be about to read some very welcome news.

Robotic Process Automation(RPA), from Automation Anywhere can completely automate repetitious copying from standard documents and pasting into target applications, and thus relieve users of the error-prone drudgery to which they had previously become resigned.

Consider this use case:

A frequent business process requires data that resides in standard PDF files stored in a corporate document repository. The same fields are required every time, but the values vary. When extracted, they’re checked to make sure the values are within agreed ranges, then pasted into desktop applications like MS Office, or into Web or Cloud applications, say Finance or HR. In addition, other values in the target applications are context-sensitive and require look-ups – for example Line Manager Name based on specific employee name, or Address based on postal/zip code search. Real life example processes might be timesheet completion, expense claims, or onboarding tick-list completion.

In our experience, benefits immediately accrue – processes execute more quickly and with fewer errors and employees with scarce skills are freed-up to do more appropriate tasks.

Following the installation and configuration of an Automation Anywhere software robot, the whole process can be initiated at a given time/date with no human intervention, with the robot using Optical Character Recognition to scan the PDF for the correct fields, extracting the required values, automatically doing the range checks and necessary lookups, then pasting the latest values into the target desktop, Web or Cloud applications.

In our experience, benefits immediately accrue – processes execute more quickly and with fewer errors and employees with scarce skills are freed-up to do more appropriate tasks.

R.I.P. repetitious Copy and Paste – you won’t be missed.

 

Dan

Daniel Chidgey is a senior consultant at Extra Technology. He is an accredited Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Automation Anywhere RPA technology.

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