Since the advent of the information age, there have been several waves of process automation, such as Computerized automation (which occurred between the 1970s and 1990s), business process management (BPM) in the 90s and RPA in the 2000s To understand the current state of RPA, we need to understand what came before it, primarily starting with the improvements after the 1990s
BPM is simply a combination of methods that allow business processes to work more efficiently In the 1990s, many technology companies, including IBM and Oracle, introduced various automation technologies to optimize business processes, later called business process automation Subsequently, the digital transformation movement led to the development of RPA
The history of RPA tells that there were three key predecessors of Robotic Process Automation that are given below:
Screen Scraping
Screen scraping technology is considered an important step in creating RPA. This technology is used to extract data from the web, programs and documents and then display them by another application.
Workflow Automation and Management Tools
Workflow automation is a process that includes a series of
automatic actions that help reduce manual tasks. This
actions should be repetitive so that their steps are predictable. such action Automation can be achieved using automation management tools use workflow automation business rules to decide when steps are completed and executed.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the ability of computers, machines or robots to perform tasks that generally require human intelligence. AI programming relies on three techniques: learning, reasoning, and auto-correction. The application of artificial intelligence is endless and can be applied to many different sectors and industries
Commonly used AI technologies include:
- Image Recognition – It is the technology that identifies and detects objects or attributes in images or videos.
- Speech Recognition – It is the technology that identifies words and phrases in spoken language and converts them into a machine-readable format.
- Natural Language Generation – It is the technology that transforms structured data into natural language.
- Sentiment Analysis – It is the technology that uses natural language processing, text analysis, and biometrics to identify, extract, quantify, and study subjective information.
All these technologies together made RPA such an impactful technological platform and added more benefits for the business users.