The RPA Cycle In Four Stages
RoboWorx Staff | July 2019
T
he steadily increasing prevalence of
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in
businesses has brought with it many
benefits, from increasing productivity using
current resources to improving job and
customer satisfaction. Users across the board
plan to continue using RPA with an expansion
of its use in their businesses in the next few
years. RPA describes a system of processes
within an operation or task that moves from
manual input to a digitized, automated process
carried out by robots. In doing so, a company’s
human workforce gains the freedom to focus on
more complex intuitive problems where skills
are most needed. The method of RPA within a
business can be broken down into four distinct
categories:
• Process Tracking + Reporting
• Rule Configuration
• Learning + Experience
• Predictive Reasoning
Within these four stages, process automation
lays the groundwork for completing the
process based on past data and then uses data
collected to predict future outcomes to craft a
more intuitive and accurate system. To better
understand the stages of RPA, here is a closer
look into their functions.
The Four Stages of the RPA Cycle
Process Tracking + Reporting
Before complex processes can be automated,
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users must create a series of simple processes
to build a solid database. These simple
processes order inputted data into a usable
structure. Once in place, users can deploy more
complex automation to extract, manipulate,
and analyze. Building the database itself
emphasizes the simplicity of the collection
process. If more manual labor is required to
build a database, such as manually scanning
paper or additional repetitive keyed entry,
automation will inversely affect RPA’s impact
on a company’s system.
The initial setup of the system takes data and
sorts it into structured formatting. Building a
database in this first step may involve sorting
data based on category or type in complex
sets of values. No rules or actions are taken to
move and manipulate that data occur in this
stage. Instead, it simply involves the building
of information and pieces needed to carry out
more complex functions later on.
Rule Configuration
The second stage of RPA now implements
rules and regulations to move and manipulate
data. In this stage, applying rules to the data
will require coding by a programmer, using
APIs, and other programming tasks that give
life and movement to the automated process.
Rule configuration helps to automate the most
simple and repetitive tasks within a process.
Such tasks often include copy and paste
functions within the database, not/or/and
sorting, and if/then decision-making with the
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The RPA Cycle In Four Stages (Cont’d)
RoboWorx Staff | July 2019
accrued data. By adding rules to the database
through functions, users can now work with
data and the databases for simple automation.
In other words, these rules and regulations put
the data accrued in step 1 to work.
Learning + Experience
Once an automated process goes live and
begins to operate within the business, users
can monitor functioning RPA bots through
a workflow management system. As the
automated processes begin to test and work
through the accrued data, functions that do not
work within the given rules notify and alert users
to address these areas in need of attention. From
there, users can further configure and adapt
the rules. In this stage, automated processes
undergo a learning curve that help set in place
more complex tasks for automation, such as
copy and paste functions that distribute data
from one system to another. Users may go back
and forth between steps two and three as they
refine an automated process.
Predictive Reasoning
After the initial learning curve, the RPA system
can harness the powers of artificial intelligence
(AI) to make some qualitative decisions that
humans used to make within the process. More
complex if/then decisions and not/or/and
sorting across platforms can be conducted.
Users can then implement boundaries into the
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system that address the errors picked up during
the learning and experience stage. Further, this
stage now helps humans to analyze the data by
reading patterns within data behavior and using
those patterns to predict future outcomes.
Going Forward
These four stages combine to form a full
cycle of the RPA process that for many users
will continue to reoccur as a company’s
automated process network grows. Although
the technology is in its early stages of roll-out,
experts foresee the value of the automation
market to reach a staggering $3B by 2020.
These predictions include both new users
implementing an RPA cycle within their
businesses and existing users expanding their
RPA network.
Just as new processes undergo a learning and
experience stage, so is RPA undergoing its
own learning curve within the market today.
As we continue to accrue data on its use and
functionality, we will begin to employ our own
predictive reasoning capabilities to make
qualitative decisions regarding its use. And yet
even with the small amount of data we have
today, with almost certainty we can predict
that not only will RPA be an integral part of the
future of business, but it may also be its lifeline.
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