Robotic process automation & UIPath
Before discussing UIPath or Robotic Process Automation, let me write about the 80/20 rule and why the rule is so important.
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes, so what does this statement mean?
In our day-to-day life, we expect all causes will have the same significance for example all customers are equally valuable, every product in a business is of equal importance, all the decisions we make in our day-to-day life will impact our life equally, but certainly, this is not true. The 80/20 principle states that when two sets of data related to cause and result are examined, there will always be an imbalance in it may be 70/30, 65/35 but hardly it will be 50/50.
So why I am talking about the 80/20 Principle how is it relevant to RPA or UIPath discussion. Let me tell you a story, In 1963, IBM discovered that about 80 percent of a computer’s time is spent executing about 20 percent of the operating code. The company immediately rewrote its operating software to make the most used 20 percent very accessible and user friendly, thus making IBM computers more efficient and faster than competitor’s machines for the majority of applications.
Before applying automation, we should first figure out which areas in our project/process manual work is present, and out of that what is that 20% area where most of the manual time is spent. In another word, Our target should be to minimize the 80% manual effort that is spent on 20% area of processes/projects.
Now that we know which area of our process we need to automate, I will briefly explain what is RPA? why we should spend our time on it? How it can be beneficial for the organization, How it will help to generate alpha for the business, and how it can help us to stay ahead of our competitors.
What is RPA?
Let me explain RPA in a very simple form, You might have seen robots, doing repetitive jobs like iRobot to clean the house, Sophia to track faces, maintain eye contact, and recognize people, Similarly RPA is a process to automate the work you perform on your laptop.
A more formal definition would be
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions interacting with digital systems and software. Just like people, software robots can do things like understanding what’s on a screen, completing the right keystrokes, navigating systems, identifying and extracting data, and performing a wide range of defined actions. But software robots can do it faster and more consistently than people, without the need to get up and stretch or take a coffee break. source
Now that we understood what is RPA, The obvious question we will have in our mind would be
Why do we need RPA?
RPA helps you mainly achieve the below two things
- Accuracy
- Saving Time
The task performed by RPA bots are more accurate and in lesser time as compared to tasks done manually.
The above two factors can help your organization to achieve a lot of KPIs like customer retention/satisfaction (The more accurate you show data to the customer less likely he/she will switch to any other platform), you free brilliant mind of your organization from the monotonous task which in turn will help to bring more innovation, increase productivity etc etc…, in short, this will help you to stay ahead from your competitor.
So if you reached this point of the blog, I am assuming you are probably convinced about why we need RPA if you are still not convinced, I am interested to read contra points from you in the comment section.
Now that we have an idea of what is RPA and how it is beneficial, Let’s look now who are the prominent players in the RPA along with their market share why we are looking into the players, you will get to know very shortly keep reading.
The above market share is relative and numbers can be 1% here and there but the key thing to focus on the above number is, UIPath is the market leader with a market share of around 29%, so now you know why we are talking about market share. As a thumb rule “There is no place of inefficiency in this world” and for the same reason great companies gets extraordinary valuation, top talent from the market whereas average or below-average company slowly move out of the ecosystem. There is a good chance of success if you associate yourself with the winners hence I am explaining and talking about UIPath in this blog.
Before we go ahead I want to tell you one heartbreaking news “UIPath Studio is only available for Windows, so if you want to create something locally and you are having a Mac machine, it is certainly not possible”. Do you want to take a sip of water?. To overcome the sorrow, please go ahead…
Now that we talked about RPA and briefly about UIPath, it’s time to dig in more about UIPath.
Who is UIPath?
This is what they mentioned on their website - “Hello, we’re UiPath. We make software robots, so people don’t have to be robots”.
Since 2015, UIPath’s customer base has been growing around 200%, Currently the company has roughly 8000 customers. 65% of the Fortune 500 companies are UIPath’s customers, one more reason to create RPA Robots using UIPath.
Below is the product category of UIPath (taken from their website).
UIPath Studio is IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for developers.
UIPath orchestrator is a web application that provides centralized path management that involves triggering, logging.
Robots are services that can be directly installed on machines to automate their day-to-day tasks.
Huff, I wrote so much, let me take a sip of tea and I will write the next blog for you on UIPath Studio, Till then take care, sleep well, eat well, keep smiling, and do not take tension of your office work sooner or later it will get finished. :)
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Disclaimer: The 80/20 rule I have quoted from the book by “Richard Koch The 80 20 principles”.
