Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a clone? Someone to sit at your desk in the office to do all the tedious, mundane, and monotonous work? The reality of getting a robot to do tasks that were previously done by humans is now made possible by robotic process automation.
Robotic process automation is not a new concept. For years, people have been programming scripts to download data from websites, macros to automate spreadsheets, and recorders to record mouse-clicks. Whatever could be done by a computer could be fulfilled somehow or other in the hands of a highly skilled programmer. However, it is only recently where all these capabilities have been built into a product. And to top it off, the tools enable citizen developers to build their own processes without the technical complexity of writing oodles of code lines.
In this chapter, we will start at square one. We will take a look at what robotic process automation is all about and we will perform a quick study to pick out a process suited for RPA. The topics covered in this chapter are the following:
- What is robotic process automation?
- Finding a process suitable for automation
- The process definition document
