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Diving Deeper in Robotic Process Automation

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Tarulata Champawat

May 02, 2019

Note: This post is a part of our series InfoBeans Innovation Day 2019. You can learn about how it all started in our first post here.

While our first technology conference- InfoBeans Innovation Day 2019 turned out to be amazing for all the attendees, we’d like you to be a part of it too. In case you missed the session, we’ve got you covered. With this post, we will share insights about Robotic Process Automation represented by our RPA team at the conference.

The first presentation at the InfoBeans Innovation Conference 2019 was conducted by our RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) team. Leading the session, Prankur Joshi shared that the three most important factors in current times are efficiency, precision and speed are crucial. When combined together and utilized properly, all three of these can help us increase our overall business potential while saving valuable time.

Employees in large organizations and enterprises often encounter certain processes that are made up of repetitive tasks. In order to complete these tasks, a lot of resources, as well as time, gets consumed. Robotic process automation can be a solution in these cases as it can allow people to use robots for such tasks that don’t require human intervention. While robots work on these tasks, employees can make use of their time by working on other productive tasks.

Robotic Process Automation is when Robots emulate actions that humans would have performed to execute a business process.”

Prankur Joshi also shared some examples of scenarios where RPA can be utilized by businesses. These can be tasks that are highly repetitive and manual in nature, processes that involve high volume data (data fabrication), rule-based processes (claim-processing) and last but not the least processes with standard readable electronic input requirement. Automating processes that contain at least one of the mentioned characteristics can save a lot of time and human energy.

Our team then demonstrated the concept of RPA through a demo RPA application called TFRS (Team-members Financial Record System.) The TFRS solution was created to showcase how RPA technology can be useful for the finance industry. The application showcased the execution investment declaration and verification process through RPA technology without wasting time.

Demonstrating the application, Manish Malpani shared an overview of income tax calculation process for salaried employees in India. The period of the financial year in India is from 1st April to 31st March. Salaried employees of organizations are asked by the finance teams to submit their investment declaration which helps them save some amount on their taxable income. These deductions can be made via health insurance, house rent, etc. Based on the investment declaration provided by employees, the finance team performs calculation and deducts the taxes.

While this is an important process, it requires repetitive manual work which consumes a lot of time. Another member from our team, Kshitij, further shared how this process is currently executed along with the pain-points during the execution.

For better reference, here are the steps that are being followed currently for tax calculation at InfoBeans. In order to execute this process for a team size of 800-900 people at our company, our finance team usually takes 2-3 weeks of time.

Team members submit investment declaration via a Google form

  1. Team members submit hard copies of their investment proof
  2. Finance associate refers to the excel sheet to find the declaration amount of a team member
  3. Finance associate refers to the hard copy of the investment proofs to validate the number of investments
  4. Finance associates then take the necessary actions to update records and inform team members

The demo RPA solution created by our RPA team would significantly reduce the time consumed during tax calculation and execute it in a matter of a few minutes. This is made possible by using RPA technology via UiPath Studio to handle the manual work such as cross-verification of data entries submitted by team members against the document proof submitted by them.

If the program is able to match both the entries successfully, reports are created for respective team members. These reports are automatically triggered to the employees via email if their information is successfully verified. In case of any issue in the data matching, an alert in the form of the email will be shared with the team member and they’ll be asked to submit the data again.

The RPA program will also generate another report for the finance team members. This report will allow them to find entries of successfully validated team members and the finance team can then finally use this for tax calculation. Here are some of the screenshots from the presentation that’ll help you understand the demo steps better:

The Go-Green Benefit

Along with all these business benefits, our RPA demo application would also contribute highly to an eco-friendly environment by cutting paper usage in the tax calculation process. Providing statistics on this topic, Manish said, “For a size of 900 members at InfoBeans, we are saving 20,000 A4 pages annually by using this application rather than taking out the print-outs for submitting to the finance team as done in the traditional method.”

Enterprise Use-Cases of RPA

Continuing the benefits of RPA technology, our team elaborated on how RPA technology can help enterprises to gain maximum benefits.

Data Fabrication- Enterprises work on creating applications on a big level and therefore, they require a huge amount of data-sets to test these applications. Test data is created by combining data from different resources and putting it into excels with thousands of entries. The problem with test data is that it can often contain critical pieces of real information such as SSN number, address and contact details of a person, etc.

Using RPA solution on this test data, these values can be manipulated by using certain logic and can then be used to test applications without the fear of exposing real-data. Moreover, the process of creating test data via RPA can be executed in merely 20-30 minutes.

Password Reset or Unlock- Employees of any organization often face the problem of losing the password or locking their system accidentally. Due to security reasons, they need to communicate with the system security department in order to reset their password.

The process becomes time-consuming and also involves extra effort from multiple teams. This process can be easily automated by using RPA software. The RPA application will conduct the overall process of ticket resolving and password reset in a matter of minutes without the need of any human intervention.

User Onboarding- While conducting the process of user onboarding, the HR departments have a certain set of instructions, questions, and processes in hand. Since the process is highly repetitive in nature, an RPA application can be used to conduct it rather than involving anyone from the HR department. The RPA app will send all the prerequisites to the user directly on their systems and allow them to take action further on.

Concluding the session, our RPA team member Manish elaborated the use-cases of RPA in different process of the supply chain, IT and finance, and accounting. While RPA is a recently introduced technology, enterprises are moving towards using it in the longer run. POCs are being created by organizations to understand the effects of RPA to manage customer-focused and external processes more effectively.

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