RPA technology brings the whole new world at our fingertips. More on the history of RPA Technology and robotic automation tools, in or article below.
According to a study by McKinsey and Company on emerging and disruptive technology, it’s predicted that robotic automation technology, like robotic process automation (RPA), will have a possible economic impact of nearly $6.7 trillion by 2025. The automation market is predicted to own the second biggest economic impact of the technology considered (e.g. 3D printing, cloud technologies, autonomous vehicles) supporting the expansion of the mobile Internet for tablets and smartphones. Given these statistics, it’s obvious that the rise of robotic automation is happening fast, and RPA is predicted to grow into one of the most technological platforms and to be a standard for positive business outcomes and performance.
RPA technology has developed quickly in the last few years and took the automation technology industry like a tornado. This leads us to the question:
How new are the robotic automation tools? What are its sources?
Traditional robotic automation exists for quite a while, but it is not always clear how RPA compares to the other technologies. Is RPA technology sharing some similarities with its predecessors? If so, how are they alike and where do they diverge? How has RPA matured and grown in such a brief time, and what are the vital markers or signposts in this development? To answer these questions and follow the history of RPA automation, in this article we will examine the development of RPA and its roots and evolution.
RPA automation is viewed by many as a game-changing technology, yet a frequent debate among the automation community is if RPA is a new development or if it should rather be viewed as an extension of the previous technologies. To know where you are now, you must examine where you had been. To be able to appreciate the current state of RPA, we will need to understand what came before it, beginning primarily with improvements after the 1990s.
The key predecessors of RPA technology
Screen scraping software found its initial days before the evolution of the Internet was developed. It had been the first technology to make a bridge between current systems and incompatible legacy systems, and it has more recently been used to extract information from the net on the presentation layer. While there certainly are advantages of screen scraping over manual labour, screen scraping software is also restricted, for instance, the program’s compatibility with existing applications and systems changes and its reliance on the underlying HTML code of websites is making it hard for the average business user to understand. Because of this, many organizations seeking a more adaptable, versatile technology.
Workflow automation and management applications
While the roots of the term “workflow automation” dates back to the 1920s during the industrial age manufacturing and the robotic automation tools emerged, the term became more frequently used in the 1990s. Workflow automation applications may, for example, assist in order processing by filling in certain fields of interest, such as client contact information, total invoice amount, the ordered item, transforming them into your organization’s database, and notifying the corresponding employee. This sort of software eliminates the need for manual data entry and increases order fulfilment rates, such benefits include greater speed, efficiency, and precision.
AI
Despite the earlier improvements in RPA, the expression “artificial intelligence” wasn’t used until 1956 in a conference at Dartmouth College. Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intervention and intellect. The tasks which can be made by AI robots are those which were previously highly dependent upon individuals for their judgment and decision-making capability including, for instance, fraud detection and financial planning. While AI can be costly, the advantages of AI include greater accuracy and precision in tasks and replacement of dull, time-consuming manual labour.
As they say, the whole is greater than the sum of its components. While each of these improvements and breakthroughs in automation technology was something big, the development and deployment of robotic automation and its ability to combine, refine, and reimagine certain elements of all these technologies is what actually makes RPA a very impactful technological platform.