Applications and Challenges of Software Robots (RPA)

2022

Where software robots work

Robots simulate human actions in working with PCs, which means that all industries where a person works at a computer are quite suitable for digital employees. Of course, there are tasks that are overwhelming for software robots, say, they cannot transfer papers. But in the digital world, robots feel quite comfortable.

I note that even interactions with people do not belong to the limitations of RPA - artificial intelligence and machine learning have already coped with the tasks of voice communication and data structuring.

Today, RPA activities associated with the most popular IT products are most often developed: working with mail, tables, Excel, Active Directory- PDF,files/ SOAP REST requests. A classic example of RPA is the replacement by a software robot of routine transactions in accounting.

The processing of a large volume of primary documents is still one of the main "pains" for most companies. Robots are great for automating the process of processing incoming documents - Document Understanding, "says Dmitry Smykalov from GMCS.- We have experience in creating robots that recognize documents, extract and transfer data to the desired system.

Perhaps it is true that the maximum number of routine processes is in the financial block and accounting, but there are also other areas attractive to RPA, for example, HR, document management, logistics, supply chain support, etc., "notes Victoria Babankina of NFP. - So, for the HR unit, routine recruitment operations are the posting of vacancies, search for candidates for mass vacancies, establish the first contact with the candidate.

As the expertise increases, robotization needs to be introduced where it will have the greatest benefit with the least cost and effort, which does not depend on the department, "agrees Anton Sergeyev.

For example, one of the popular applications of robots is bots in support services and service, which act as consultants and assistants to users of the system or customers of the company, says Pavel Borchenko.

A very popular robot is a buyer. He collects proposals, analyzes them, draws up documents. Robots that work with debtors are common, especially in sales companies, "he adds." Software robots regulate receivables - these are typical processes, they include many tasks that are related to working with external systems. Here, the robot, like a person, performs semi-manual mass operations.

The IT robot administrator can, for example, independently identify requests for adding a new user in Outlook or other similar services, enter data into systems through existing interfaces, and then notify process participants about the task.

Chatbot for Service Desk is a good addition to the Call Center or internal Service Desk, capable of supporting various business scenarios of user technical support. He knows how to integrate with CRM, external online communications systems (Skype, instant messengers, etc.), corporate instant messengers and knows how to work on mobile devices.

GMCS has a typical RPA solution for counterparty scoring.

Checking counterparties using external systems and services is one of the most time-consuming processes for the procurement and security department, "says Dmitry Smykalov.

The company has developed a scoring model, which includes several dozen indicators that are configured for the customer: checking the Unified State Register of Legal Entities/EGRIP, EFRSB, EIS in the field of procurement, file cabinet of arbitration cases, etc.

According to the results of the audit, the robot evaluates and assigns to the counterparty a point for each indicator, on the basis of which an internal rating of counterparties is formed, "explains Dmitry Smykalov.

And for its own marketing department, a software robot has been developed that publishes news and marketing messages on more than 20 resources, where information is posted through personal accounts or an authorization form. According to Dmitry Smykalov, robot it takes an average of no more than 30 minutes to post such information, while manually it can take specialists several hours of routine processes of copying text and filling in fields.

Alexander Chernikov notes that among the most popular applications of RPA is the collection of data from sources that are not available for system integration:

This can be parsing third-party web resources or marketplaces, for example, to form their own dynamic price lists. Or working with public services portals that cannot be connected using the API, but can only interact through the interface.

Roughly speaking, you cannot set up synchronization between Excel, SAP, mail and Bitrix in two months, and so that it works flawlessly and in exactly the style that a business user imagines. And with the help of RPA, this becomes quite real, "notes Alexander Chernikov.

Director of Nekst CTR Mikhail Verisov confirms: one of the most important features of RPA technology is the ability to quickly integrate several information systems without their deep refinement. For example, software robots provide integration of the corporate ERP system "Nekst" with the IT systems of our partners through the web user interface: these are client web applications of more than 20 third-party companies, including banks, analytical agencies, news portals, as well as suppliers and consumers of services "Nekst."

Blue Prism notes that the demand for RPA technologies in Russia manifested itself back in 2017, moreover, not only among large banks, but also extractive industries - the first pilot RPA projects started there.

In general, the popularity of RPA technologies globally in various industries has changed over the past years. Unlike 2019, when telecom was the main consumer of software robots, according to the results of 2020, the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) application segment became the dominant field of RPA implementation: last year it accounted for more than 29% of global revenue. Grand View Research analysts are expected to maintain a high level of RPA acceptance in the BFSI sector in the near term.

^{Global Enterprise Industry Plans for RPA Implementation
Source: Impact, 2019 RPA Implementation Industries. Source: Grand View Research, 2021}

However, analysts expect the highest RPA growth rates until 2028 in the pharmaceutical and healthcare segments. This is due to the large volume of work in these industries in connection with COVID-19 and population vaccination programs.

Sergey Lozhkin, CEO of PIX Robotics, does not notice any pronounced industry popularity of RPA in Russia: "In the Russian Federation, we robotize a wide range of companies: large production and energy companies, military-industrial complex, retail (food and non-food), banks, service companies. Back office robotization is a classic, but now we are looking more towards the robotization of the commercial sector and the production sector, that is, at those processes that allow companies to earn more or optimize, for example, communication with customers, customer service or marketing activities. " And, for example, for India, the company is now working on a specific case related to FMCG and e-commerce.

ABBYY Russia analyzed RPA projects implemented in the first half of 2020. The top 3 industries are as follows: banks (36%), industry (16%), retail (14%). At the same time, in the first half of the year alone, the number of new projects with RPA doubled compared to the previous year. The company attributes such results to the growing demand of Russian enterprises for intelligent automation, when robots are used in more complex tasks than just data transfer. Examples of such projects include processing structured and unstructured documents in purchasing, accounting, human resources, customer support, and so on.

According to the TAdviser database, which as of January 2022 contains information on more than 100 RPA projects, most often such systems are introduced in the financial services and trade sectors . In addition, among the most prominent consumers of RPA solutions are the metallurgical industry, the public sector and medicine.

Company Size Matters for RPA Implementation

According to the forecast of Grand Vuew Research for 2021-2028, the highest annual growth indicators (CAGR) during this period will be demonstrated by enterprises from the SMB segment. Researchers explain the high growth rates due to the growing popularity of RPA in small enterprises in order to increase their productivity, reduce labor costs when performing labor-intensive repetitive tasks. "Because for small and medium-sized organizations, the main challenges are the need to reduce recurring monthly costs in order to increase profits, these organizations are trying to solve the efficiency problem by integrating new RPA solutions into existing accounting IT systems. RPA help the small enterprises to overcome deficiency of employees for performance of the repeating tasks and to reduce quantity of human mistakes due to use of functions of automation", - authors of the predictive research Robotic Process Automation Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Type, By Service, By Application, By Deployment, By Organization, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2021 - 2028 emphasize, Grand View Research.

Global RPA vendors, in turn, began to pay attention to this segment of customers. For example, in April last year, UiPath provided enterprises with access to its Automation HUB robotics center at no additional cost, and provides software free of charge for companies. Working in the health sector .

As for the Russian market, robots are expensive for small Russian businesses, says Alexander Chernikov from First Bit. Office Sports ":

Small businesses are looking for cheap box solutions that simply do not exist under their requests.

He explains that this category of customers is usually interested in RPA, referring to the prospect of savings through downsizing. But since they think with minimal budgets, in the end they most often come to the conclusion that it is cheaper and easier to abandon robotization.

Indeed, the introduction of RPA is an IT project, and 99% of processes for robots of any scale have to be done from scratch, since the "insides" of systems for robots are always unique, and there are always their nuances in the logic of the process, "said Alexander Chernikov.

From the point of view of the algorithm, software robots in different industries are similar. But each company uses its own data sources, its own IT systems and the knowledge bases with which the robot interacts, "confirms Pavel Borchenko.

For this segment, the goal of robotization is precisely to optimize processes where people are a valuable resource, and it needs to be unloaded from the routine, providing the opportunity to perform really useful actions, "said Alexander Chernikov.

However, in his opinion, it makes no sense to "entrust" the robot (meaning the robot license) with one process - this is unprofitable, since, having quickly executed one algorithm, the robot will be idle the rest of the time.

The robot needs to be loaded at least 80%, for this it is assigned several processes or even several dozen, the expert comments.

Robots mainly help to close individual local needs, but about the robotization of the company as a whole, we are not talking about using RPA as one of the fundamental technologies in the corporate IT infrastructure.

RPA in the financial sector of the Russian Federation

Banks are a traditional leader in the field of intelligent information processing in Russia. So, in Sberbank at the end of 2017, a robot collector was launched. Today, he makes 85% of communications in 22 areas of Sberbank, covering more than 400 thousand debtors daily. At the same time, the accuracy of fixing the result reaches 98%. According to the bank, the bank's costs of collecting each ruble decreased by 17%, and the robot itself went outside Sberbank - over 50 different companies use its services.

In 2020, Sberbank completed a large-scale automation project to issue loan agreements with major corporate customers.

From a practical point of view, applying for a loan for legal entities is not an easy process. In one of the largest Russian banks, this required collecting and structuring data from 9 different systems. In manual mode, 53 people did this, and another 6 people then manually checked the entered information for input errors. According to bank statistics, 20% of employees made 1-2 errors per day during initial data entry, and at least one of the inspectors missed 1-2 errors every day. After the implementation of the RPA system, 30 out of 53 people were transferred to other tasks, and the number of errors in filling out applications was reduced by 10-15 times.

Bank Uralsib"" robotized the process of creating a customer card to open an SME account in. ABS CFT The robot regularly monitors e-mail in search of information about creating a new application in the Sugar system. CRM As soon as such an event occurs, the robot retrieves by data request through the Sugar CRM system interface, creates a customer card in the ABS CFT system and generates a request for opening an SME account.

During the pandemic, VTB performed at a shock pace - in just three weeks - robotization of data verification for applications of small businesses for preferential loans (2% per annum - as part of the state support program for employment). This robot can process up to 1,500 applications per day. In April, VTB introduced the robot into the routine process of reconciling the bank's accounting documents. Today, it performs 95% of the tasks of the process around the clock: generates reports, extracts data from documents, checks their correctness, uploads them to the right IT systems or alerts employees about an identified error.

At Raiffeisenbank, the robot is engaged in comparing the texts of contracts - the procedure has accelerated three times, compared with manual reconciliation of documents. Renaissance Credit has simplified remote service with RPA. In the mobile application "Modulbank," the software robot helps the client create a payment order from photos and bill scans, and then pay any bills from a smartphone, and all this in a few seconds.

Back in 2018, Rosgosstrakh automated three business processes of the operating block. One works around the clock, processing the contract queue in real time, and the other two are started in situations of load reduction in the first process. This allows not only to effectively manage the queue of documents for processing, noted in the company, but also to optimally use software licenses. Rosgosstrakh spent some time stabilizing technology, and then began the next stage of robotization. It is planned to expand the scope of actions of robots, both in the current operating unit and in related ones, in particular, in client service.

Otkritie Bank, together with KPMG consultants, implemented a project to increase the efficiency of the operating unit using RPA: on the basis of the built process model, proposals for process automation were formed and a pilot project was completed for five processes of the small and medium-sized business unit. According to Oksana Apeikina, deputy head of the Otkritie Bank operations block, successful piloting gave the scaling of RPA technology in the operations block, and then in other departments. According to her estimates, it takes 2-3 months to robotize one turnkey process, depending on the complexity of the robot being developed.

In the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, robots work on several processes. One automates the HR department's process of processing and consolidating revenue forms for publication on the Internet. Instead of a few days of manual labor involving six HR specialists, this task now requires 15 minutes of robot operation.

The second robot transfers the personal data of the new employee to the set of software "Personnel and Salary" ("1C"). " Previously, four HR specialists were engaged in this task, and it took more than two hours to complete the employee's data in 1C.

Another robot automates the collection of reports from the GIS subsystem "Electronic Budget." Previously, 15 employees were involved in this activity, it took several days to upload and reconcile reports on reporting forms and even up to a week to rename and systematize reports. Now one robot copes with the entire amount of work per day.

Moscow Exchange automated the monitoring of press releases on the Bank of Russia website with the help of RPA in order to find up-to-date news about the deprivation of a license by banks. Previously CENTRAL BANK , three employees were involved in the monitoring of press releases on the site, and there was a risk of missing a key event. Now the software robot checks the regulator's website every two minutes, looks for news related to the revocation of bank licenses, and if it detects, alerts through MS Outlook all interested parties.

Industrial RPA

The need for automation solutions business processes by equipment manufacturers metallurgical , factories, automobile concerns is partly due to accelerated digitalization due to the pandemic, the company says: ABBYY customers saw how critical the factor of the physical presence of employees turned out to be, and began to gradually translate processes into a "figure." As a result, for example, the company "," Nizhnekamskneftekhim one of the largest petrochemical companies, Europe six times accelerated the processing of financial documents.

The Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK) in the fall completed a pilot project to automate work with financial documents based on the Russian solution of NFP for the Sinarsky Pipe Plant (SinTZ), which is part of TMK.

At TsBU TMK-Sinara LLC, automation and digitalization of business processes are one of the priority areas for increasing the company's efficiency. In 2022, a portfolio of measures was formed to automate and robotize business processes, "says Elena Zasseeva, chief specialist of the project support department of the IT Support, Development and Efficiency Department of TsBU TMK-Sinara LLC.

The processes of the unified TMK-Sinara Business Services Center, which serves the enterprises of TMK Group and Sinara Group in the areas of Personnel, Finance, Accounting, Legal Support, are subject to robotization.

Currently, the software robot performs the process in the direction of the financial direction - it performs automatic reconciliation of settlements between the Sinarsky pipe plant and counterparties. To this end, the robot supports a number of work scenarios: e-mail processing, working with attached reconciliation files, recognizing documents in PDF format and, Microsoft Excel generating relevant acts in the ERP system by SinTZ, and reconciliation of calculations. To the robot is required for automated reconciliation of acts for about three minutes, while in manual mode - an order of magnitude more.

According to Elena Zasseeva, it is planned to introduce robots in all areas of the Central Budget. At the same time, the selection of processes for robotization is made on the basis of an assessment of the labor intensity of the process and the technical feasibility of using RPA technology.

In the pilot mode, Surgutneftegas launched two information robots, says Rinat Gimranov, head of the information technology department of Surgutneftegas: one is related to the processing of information on balances in warehouses and procurement, the second works with contracts.

I think that in the coming years we will try to introduce more RPA information bots into our processes, "says Rinat Gimranov," Mainly in the field of accounting, tax accounting, because in these areas there are good prospects for the implementation of RPA: good determinicity, incompatimicity, etc., conditions for the effective implementation of information bots.

Petersburg Sales Company, a guaranteeing electricity supplier in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, has automated the process of filing claims in court through the My Arbitrator system. The software robot created on the ROBIN platform searches for new claims in a network folder in Word and PDF format, receives from them the necessary parameters (TIN, organization name, etc.), creates a claim in the "My Arbitrator" system according to the parameters received.

LokoTech is a company that manages railway business assets that provide maintenance, repair, modernization and leasing of locomotives, production of units and parts for railway engineering enterprises. With the help of a software robot, a routine process is automated - daily reporting on measurements of wheel pairs of rolling stock. For each locomotive from the Excel spreadsheet, the robot searches for wheelset information in two systems, then uploads the data and then aggregates it into a summary report.

Vegetable canned food manufacturer Bonduelle robotic the transfer of data between IT systems when processing orders for the supply of products. There are several software robots that regularly monitor the appearance of new product purchase orders from stores in two systems, extract information about orders, and transfer information to the consolidated order register. The robot also performs several checks in the internal system of the company, in particular, checks the answers of warehouses about the availability of goods and, in case of lack of products, sends information to the responsible employee. In addition, two days before the date of shipment, the robot "loads" the order to the warehouse and sends summary tables with deliveries to the warehouses.

TVEL - Rosatom's fuel division uses software robots, for example, to automate procurement procedures. Daria Tulipa, a leading expert on digital technologies at TVEL JSC, says that they include many very time-consuming elements: collecting TAP and finding a source of price information, forming documents for calculating the initial maximum contract price (NMCD), a long and multi-cycle process for coordinating the initial TA and the draft contract. The Atombot complex copes with all these tasks today. Procurement, "which includes 14 robots. They are responsible for checking the terms of reference, generating NMCDs, using the text recognition system, AI technologies, and are able to work with the integration data bus.

Three robots are looking for sources of price information on the, and Yandex.Market Zakupki.gov.ru the website of purchases of the nuclear industry. Three more Robots check the received information with the price base in the master system () SAP ERP of the company over the past 3 months.

The system will independently form a request for a commercial offer, receive and analyze an answer, monitor prices at sites and collect the final result, "says Daria Tulipa.

Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant is one of the leaders in the introduction of software robots among metallurgical companies in Russia. In 2018, to robotize the business processes of the MMK Group, the RPA Competence and Innovation Center was created on the basis of MMP-Informservice. In the same year, robotization processes went to the departments of finance and economics, accounting, logistics, supply, HR. Further, the lessons learned were extended to other business processes. In 2019, the RPA Competence and Innovation Center received an award for the largest project on robotic process automation.

According to Andrei Eremin, Director of Economics at MMK PJSC, software robots no longer just perform routine operations, but they already know how to interact with users, analyze texts in a natural language and learn to make decisions. To do this, RPA solutions integrate AI and machine learning technologies. There is already a positive experience in using Process Discovery technologies to identify new processes suitable for robotics.

RPA in Retail

In the company X5 Retail Group , the introduction of technology RPA began with a pilot project within the general service center of the company (OTSO). It covered seven SSC processes, among which the most time-consuming, according to Natalya Gaynulina, director of the multifunctional SSC X5 Retail Group, was the process of verification with suppliers. According to her estimates, the duration of the pilot project was about nine months, and the payback period was less than a year. According to the pilot's results, it was decided to replicate this technology in the company, and a robotization expertise center was created. An RPA integration project with the system is currently underway. BPM

RPA in transportation companies

The Federal Passenger Company (FPK), a subsidiary of Russian Railways, implemented an automated business process for entering data into information systems and generating analytical reports. In order to provide the FPC marketing department with daily detailed reports on ticket sales, the software robot collects and processes information from open sources, downloads them to the Deductor analytical system, using it to build an analytical report, and then uploads the obtained data to the Microsoft Datazen system, where information dashboards are visualized .

Russian Post instructed the robot on the ROBIN platform to reconcile data. It performs daily data reconciliation in the "1C" system of the central office with the contents of the "1C" databases of the regional offices. If earlier more than 8,500 employees in the regions were engaged in manual reconciliation of data, while the activities of employees were opaque, the inability to assign KPI indicators, now less than 2,000 employees are involved in reconciliation and only to analyze differences identified by the robot.

According to the company's estimates, the robot significantly reduced the possibilities of actions of unscrupulous employees, which, according to an internal investigation, prevented losses of the company in the amount of 6 billion rubles. per year. The total economic effect of robotizing the process amounted to 1314.9 billion rubles. per year.

The First Cargo Company introduced software robots in order to reduce the period of experimental operation during the migration to the new ERP system (SAP). In total, 9 software robots were configured that periodically monitored the appearance of data in the SAP system, extracted the data that appeared through the interface and loaded into old systems, generated reports on operations performed and added to the repository for control. The automated business process of duplicating data into two systems accelerated the transition to the SAP platform and reduced the cost of implementing the new information system, since the company's employees worked only in the new ERP system.

The top ten for RPA were and remain SLCs (general service centers), that is, organizations created by large holdings to centralize personnel services, accounting, audit processes, and IT support, "said Anatoly Belaichuk from Comindware.

Indeed, many employees work in these organizations, each of whom performs a single operation, for example, makes business trips, issues 2NDFL certificates, or prepares closing documents for customers.

This is an ideal field for automation using RPA, "Anatoly Belaychuk is sure. - Outside this niche, we often see employees who switch between dozens of different tasks during the day. In such a situation, the costs of creating a robot and supporting it may not pay off.

However, in general, the current RPAs do well with a variety of data collection tasks and all kinds of mass checks: data, documents of various types, etc. This opens up the possibility of replicating proven RPA technologies to other departments and activities that also need the "skills" of software robots.

Experts also see serious prospects in the field of information security: the bots themselves will not be able to fight cyber attacks, but the army of bots is better than people to cope with monitoring the situation in real time and without human errors, will warn of emerging risks.

How a group of robots turns into a Robot Factory

The Russian leader in the launch of software robots can be considered. Sberbank There, RPA technology began to be used in 2018 and to date, Sberbank employs more than 800 robots that participate in 116 processes and perform 56 thousand operations every day. The press center of the bank says that the robots managed to transfer more than 2.8 million hours of routine work per year. For example, the time required to open a bank account to legal entities, thanks to the use of a robot, has been reduced from 4 hour. up to 40 minutes. Alfa-Bank, with the support of the consulting company Ernst & Young, robotic several dozen internal processes. According to the bank, this brings savings of up to 85 million rubles. annually. In total, about 100 bank processes were robotic, and four "digital employees" have already been decommissioned.

VTB launched the corporate Robot Factory last year in order to optimize internal business processes. It is part of VTB's technology transformation strategy. It is expected that by 2022 the bank will implement 250 software robots. X5 Retail Group robotic more than 70 processes. Among them are those that work around the clock, and those that are launched at the right times.

The robotization processes of Gazprom Neft processes started in 2017 with a pilot project on the robotization of financial processes. By the beginning of this year, the company had several dozen software robots, and over the year their number is supposed to double. The company developed its own approach to robotization, which combines both the development of internal RPA competencies and the attraction of external resources, as well as the use of the corporate stack of RPA, OCR, ML technologies. The head of the Gazprom Neft project, Yevgeny Vinokurov, notes that this allowed us to achieve a timeline for automation of processes at the level of 1-2 months for one robot.

"Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant" on the basis of its own RPA Competence and Innovation Center "robotized 50 business processes per year. In 2020, their number exceeded 100. Robots work in all the main functional divisions of MMK, says Vadim Feoktistov, director of MMP-Informservice. Moreover, according to Feoktistov, business processes have appeared in the company, specially designed for execution by software robots. Processes in which robots participate along with humans are also reengineered. At the same time, robots have roles and powers as full-fledged subjects of production activity.

Use a large number of robots with limited employee access to their sources. After all, someone specifically or by mistake can modify the robot and use it for their own purposes. Therefore, the platform should have a flexible role model that allows you to distinguish the rights of access of employees to robots or their schemes, "says Pavel Borchenko.

The first RPA pilot project at Russian Railways started in 2019 at information and computing centers (IVC) in Moscow, Samara, St. Petersburg and Chelyabinsk. It involved two processes: the introduction of regulatory and reference information, involving the adjustment of ASU "Express" tariffs for suburban electric trains, and the administration of users of an intelligent railway management system.

According to the results of the first quarter of 2020, 128 robotic routine operations were introduced on the basis of the ROBIN RPA platform. Entering information into the tariff table of ASU "Express," which used to take more than 4 hour. handmade, the robot performs in 1 hour 15 minutes. And the processing time of the incoming application in the support service with switching to a specialized specialist was reduced from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. By the end of this year, it is planned to transfer about another 140 processes to the robotic form.

For effective technological support of business process robotization technologies, the structures of the Infrastructure Technology Support Centers (CTS) in different cities are being reorganized - structures for the production and maintenance of CTS software robots based on IVC appear in them. These structures will carry out their activities in the main areas of Russian Railways business: freight commercial transportation (Voronezh), transportation management (Chelyabinsk), passenger transportation (Moscow IVC), traction (Yaroslavl), infrastructure (Nizhny Novgorod), economic activity (GVC in Moscow ). The center in Novosibirsk will remotely serve all 16 railways. The creation of a distributed factory for the production of software robots is one of the elements of the digital transformation strategy of Russian Railways until 2025.

We are switching from a system of user support to a system of creating and supporting robots, "said Victor Popov, deputy director of the Russian Railways Civil Society Center, in an interview with the Gudok industry newspaper.

Indeed, Russian Railways has the largest robot team in Russia - 1.1 thousand units.

In order to fulfill this task, the GVC began a project to create a system for managing the fleet of robots and AI programs. Pavel Borchenko says that a special dispatching module Robin Orchestrator has been created to control groups of robots in the ROBIN platform. It accumulates all information, both about the work of software robots and about the information systems with which they interact. One of the important tasks of the orchestrator is to test all robots associated with it before updating any ASU to ensure the full operability of the RPA modules with the updated system. A distinctive feature of Robin Orchestrator is the presence of a verifier that checks the created robot for malicious bookmarks in software code.

Robots must not contain code inserts. When the number of robots becomes more than 100, it becomes almost unrealistic to maintain them if there is code in the scheme.

If it is necessary to expand the functions of the platform, the head of ROBIN believes, the right solution will be to prepare such an extension separately from the robot, submit it for verification to the IB services and further re-use it in the company as a ready-made component of the robotic process.

The main difference between the processes of creating a single robot and many such robots is the appearance of special control tools and project control technology, notes Alexander Chernikov:

Many robots will require a control component, which in different RPA platforms is called "Masters" or "Orchestrator." It controls the launch of robots, licenses, schedules, integration, versioning, logs, analytics, and access.

This is a fundamental difference between two types of robotic systems: in the first case, it is a tool for a particular user, and therefore it must be simple and quick to use, and the factory is not only a set of technical RPA instruments, but also an organizational process for orchestrating the work of robots.

If, without proper management and control, all employees in the organization are allowed to create robots, chaos will arise: the problem is not only the inefficiency of such work, but also the issue of access and security. The platform for creating a robot factory should provide and support all the processes of the company related to robotics, "explains the need for robot orchestrator Pavel Borchenko.

For example, the ROBIN platform provides reuse of ready-made solutions: created robot actions or reuse of entire scenarios, as part of more complex ones. This allows you to achieve economies of scale - the more robots the company does, the lower the cost of resources it configures the following robots.

Of course, robotization is only interesting on a scale. It is highly likely that single software robots in a large company may not pay off, "warns Sergey Lozhkin, CEO of PIX Robotics.

Therefore, when scaling robotics, the company must take into account the need for a master or orchestrator who will centrally control the robots, their load, logistics, exchange, the specialist believes.

Theoretically, there are two options for creating a factory, says Alexander Chernikov. In the first, robots are controlled by the Orchestrator: under the control of a single center, robots are launched according to a single schedule and transmit data to each other.

Where necessary, they act as a single organism, forming a whole cascade of processes, "continues Alexander Chernikov:" There is an optimization of the licensed load, the load on support. It is possible to observe the whole picture "from above," and not to consider each process separately. Maintain versionality of development in a single space.

Another option is also possible: robots function separately, not interacting in any way and not knowing anything about each other.

This greatly aggravates the support process and increases the cost of the project, since in this case robots cannot be automatically "jumped" from one process to another, this can only be done manually, "Alexander Chernikov thinks. - In general, control with the help of the Orchestrator is more flexible and allows the same number of robot licenses to do a greater amount of work.

Critical Elements of the Robot Factory

Many single robots have learned to do. But when you switch to dozens or hundreds of robots, you already need to think about how to service all this, cope with loads and correctly redistribute them, how to use licenses more effectively, how to ensure continuity and reuse of solutions within the company, etc. At this stage, many technical and organizational issues arise, "says Dmitry Smykalov from GMCS.

Which of these questions are the most important?

Robot status monitoring functionality.

It is important to have a tool that will allow you to see the state of all software robots: monitor their work and quickly respond to changes. This function, by the way, can be entrusted to a special robot, says Pavel Borchenko. This is what many companies do: create a robot controller, and he monitors the systems that other robots work with: if the system becomes unavailable, then the robots associated with it will not be able to work. The robot controller will immediately see and notify those responsible.

Factory Architecture and Methodology

For the functioning of software robots in mass order, special importance for companies are: a built architecture, a methodological approach to implementation and an ecosystem of robotization, where there is the right product, methodology, community, support, "said Sergey Lozhkin, CEO of PIX Robotics.

This, of course, affects the growth of requirements for specialists involved in the RPA project.

A good tool for creating software robots is not just a system that knows how to do "something" instead of a person, but will allow you to quickly, technologically and safely realize business needs within the existing corporate framework, Pavel Borchenko believes:

For a large and mature organization, an important aspect, along with functional coverage, is the advanced ability to manage access rights, role allocation, versivity control, and logic the actions of the robot.

Additional Maintenance Support Requirements

Processes can change, the systems in which the robot works also change. Support is necessary, "emphasizes Alexander Chernikov. - This may be either in-house technical support or an agreement with a contractor for the provision of relevant services. No one knows in advance when a new business situation will arise that was not provided for in the TA, or there will be a new system error that will violate the algorithm of the robot.

For a robot factory, you will have to build special technical support, agrees Sergey Lozhkin, or create your own competence center under the wing of a reliable integrator.

They must understand how the process happens from the point of view of robots, on the one hand, and from the point of view of a robotic program, on the other. This does not require serious experience, only a common understanding of business processes and the availability of basic knowledge on RPA.

Support for robot scalability

The tool used should provide the required control and re-use of robots and individual actions of robots throughout the organization, "said Pavel Borchenko.

New Requirements for Enterprise RPA Professionals

You must learn how to manage the lifecycle of robots - from setting the task and developing through testing, commissioning, maintenance and refinement to decommissioning, "emphasizes Anatoly Belaychuk from Comindware.

In his opinion, the role of developers should be performed by business people, and IT specialists should lead the process under the general leadership of the Chief information officer.

A New Look at the Life Cycle of Robots

Do not rely too heavily on robots, says Anatoly Belaychuk, "Yes, they allow you to quickly and effectively solve an acute problem, but in parallel with the commissioning of the robot, you should plan to replace it with more reliable automation through the API. Otherwise, the technological debt will increase uncontrollably, and in the end this will lead to the bankruptcy of the IT service, which will not cope with the support of the robot army.

It is clear that this, in turn, will lead to the cessation of business-critical functions - the robot broke down, and the person who used to do this work has long been transferred to another section of work, and perhaps he has already quit.

Change Management

Indeed, even simply moving the button or changing the text on it can violate the robotic process algorithm.

There was a need for synchronous development: if the developers of the program decided to change the objects necessary for robots, RPA developers should be able to prepare robots by the time of release, "said Alexander Chernikov.

The IT department of the company should be responsible for this process, he believes, for example, through the first technical support line, which usually supports information systems.

Cost of robots development specialists

The cost of the work of programmers is a very interesting question, because the developer of robots is, in principle, a profession that can be quickly trained at the initial stage. And the entrance to the robotization market is not so difficult, "says Sergey Lozhkin.

True, this thesis applies only to those employees who set up robots, and for robotic architects, entering the labor market is complex and long. But in general, Lozhkin believes, the introduction of robotization reduces the cost of programmers globally and dilutes the market, which is now overheated by the cost of salaries of IT specialists.

The cost of a specialist developing robots is one of the main cost items for mass robotics. Therefore, the RPA platform should be simple to master. Training and involvement of a specialist should take a minimum of time, "said Pavel Borchenko.

This defines specific requirements for the RPA Toolkit interface - it should be aimed at a person with minimal technical skills (not a programmer).

The main thing is not what technologies you use, but that you use them correctly.

Robotic Process Security

You need control over employee access rights to RPA tools so that no employee can make changes uncontrollably, no matter, for better motives or malicious purposes.

Orchestrating the actions of these robots, the process of setting the task and accepting the result - for all, convenient instruments must be created that are able to control the robotic "economy" as a whole. And this is a much more difficult task than just writing a working information robot program, which, in fact, is no different from the usual script.

A more responsible and complex task is to create an eco-system of robots that supports adaptation to different systems and products, graphical interfaces of different manufacturers, and different customer application systems.

Will single robots survive or will everyone go to work in factories?

Single robots that co-live with the user of the PC on the desktop do not lead to steady changes and transformation, since they do not scale and remove dependence on the human employee, "says Christian Wells of Blue Prism. - Such robots accelerate the work of the employee, but still depend on human resources. In addition, such robots do not meet the requirements for safety, audit and compliance.

They close their niches and benefit employees and organizations. There is no point in abandoning a convenient and understandable tool.

RPA factories are, in fact, a digital outsourcing: holistic and end-to-end business processes are performed by many robots. This is the path to digital business transformation, as dependence on the human factor is eliminated, and throughput, quality, and efficiency are improved. " This is the fundamental difference between them, the specialist is sure: "Single robots are a tool in the hands of a person, and digital employees of the" RPA factory "are full-fledged workers with their own tools.

Today, according to experts working in the Russian RPA market, almost every large enterprise in Russia is currently involved in the robotization process, however, the number of robots, as a rule, is calculated by dozens of robotic programs, and not hundreds, as planned by Russian Railways. According to analysts at the Russian Deloitte office, RPA in Russia is used in various industries and functional areas, and the number of processes transferred to robots is in a wide range - from units to hundreds or more. According to a 2020 study:

• 42% of companies have already implemented RPA internally.
• Robotization in companies begins with 1-3 processes.
• More than 50 processes are robotic in 4% of respondents.
• Robotization of business processes is included in the efficiency strategy of 64% of companies.
• Average RPA ROI is 1 year.
• According to respondents, 59% of employees have poor technical training.
• Company executives are more interested in robotics than employees.

RPA Deployment Formats

According to Grand View Research estimates, in the structure of the global RPA market, local sites in 2020 accounted for the largest share of revenue - more than 90%, and this format will continue to be actively used. This is explained by the fact that the robotization movement itself originated and developed among large enterprises that were skeptical of transferring their internal data in the form of software robots to external sites. However, analysts note that recently even large enterprises have begun to pay attention to the RPA cloud infrastructure, since creating a reliable technical environment for local deployment by a robot is very expensive.

Analysts at Grand View Research expect that in the future 2021-2028. The highest growth indicator - 34% over the forecast period - will demonstrate the cloud segment of RPA. This growth is associated with the wider introduction of RPA as an outsourcing service. The robot deployed in the cloud provides low infrastructure costs, automatic upgrades, lower maintenance costs, and ease of deployment. In addition, the cloud approach is consistent with the general trends of "claudisation" of enterprise IT: the cloud provides flexibility in scaling operations and data availability in real time, regardless of the employee's place of work.

RPA robots create new business niches for market participants

The evolution of robotization of corporate business processes moves the market towards the increasingly active introduction of new software robots. These trends are reflected in the emergence of new business models.

So, back in 2019, introducing the ROBIN platform to the market , Aplana Group of Companies jokingly introduced it to the "personnel agency," offering potential employers labor resources - software robots of various specialties. And in early 2021, Russian Railways-Technologies, together with the developer ROBIN, announced the creation of the first Russian marketplace for robotic software solutions. Foreign vendors, for example, UiPath and Automation Anywhere, have similar solutions, but for the Russian market this is a new phenomenon.

At the first stage, the Cloud Factory of Software Robots will serve subsidiaries and dependent companies of the Russian Railways holding, and then this product will be offered to all companies in the transport and logistics industry, "says Alexander Miskaryan, CEO of Russian Railways-Technology.

In addition, the RPA niche has become interesting to distributors. They signed the first contracts with some RPA vendors in 2020, and MERLION already estimates its possible share of the entire Russian RPA market at 30%. Indeed, RPA technologies fall well on the distribution model of the business, both in terms of license sales and subscriptions to cloud platforms. The only difference is that these sales are not through IT departments, but through business customers. As for the professional competencies necessary for the implementation of robotic systems, the current distributors seek to take on the role of competence centers for partners, are engaged in their training and help form a strong practice.

In whose hands is the RPA tool?

According to Grand View Research estimates, in 2020, the largest share of revenue in the global RPA market - more than 41% - was in the consulting segment. And this share is not inclined to decline in the coming years, because, according to American analysts, consulting services are crucial to determine the type of RPA solution required depending on the nature of the enterprise's business. On the one hand, an RPA business consultant is a specialist who can competently determine the method by which process redesign and automation will have a direct impact on KPI customer improvement. But, on the other hand, for optimal use of automation software, organizations need IT consultants who can assess the current, IT Infrastructure business landscape and existing processes, map out a roadmap for automation and avoid implementation failures. Thus, Grand View Research expects the demand for consulting services to grow significantly over the next seven years.

On the third hand, implementation is an integral part of RPA services, and this leads analysts to predict that the implementation services segment will have the highest CAGR in 2021-2028.

However, there are other trends in Russia, Deloitte analysts say: companies prefer to work out the initiative of robotization and conduct implementation on their own, while global statistics around the world suggest otherwise - about 15% of respondent companies are engaged in independent implementation of robots.

Working with an integrator has its advantages. Firstly, this is the experience of implementations, which is growing extremely intensively. In addition, we comprehensively approach the issue of automation and combine technologies to make the most rational solution.

The downside of technology is that such robots are very sensitive to the slightest changes in systems. RPAs are good when the integrated software is closed and there are no other interfaces. Or if you need to quickly make a temporary solution, for example, for data migration. Therefore, RPA is a tool, primarily for integrators.

Victoria Babankina from NFP suggests taking this approach: you definitely need to start with an experienced team to introduce technology, thereby putting the approach to robotization on the "right rails," and in the future you can create an internal center of robotization competencies or outsource robot support.

Dmitry Smykalov advocates the right symbiosis: Шаблон:Quote 'From the point of view of daily use, the RPA is intended for a specific specialist in whose hands a particular routine process is located, and the internal competence center must work with the integrator. One internal examination here can not do.

Robotization only seems simple, "he points out. - When it comes to scaling RPA, companies face the need to involve a strong architect and expertise. Here, the integrator will certainly be useful, but it is important that he be a strong player.

If we talk about our tool, then it is quite simple. Customers often cope on their own. But sometimes, despite the presence of inhouse competencies, they attract an integrator for large-scale collaboration, "says Pavel Borchenko.

External integrators are expert consultants and internal IT departments are expert people. Both are few, and it is impossible to clone them, "the experts think. - Thus, robotization should not create additional dependence on scarce resources, which means it should be intended for business users - those very Citizen Developers.

A good RPA tool is one that is able to master not only the programmer, but also the "civic" developer, that is, a business representative, and not IT

In his opinion, the products of leading vendors satisfy this requirement - an employee who can create a macro for Excel copes with robot programming without problems.

The IT department should not so much do something with its own hands, but lead the robotics movement: train, provide a development environment, monitor quality, organize testing, determine the order of commissioning and decommissioning robots, "Belaychuk said. - External integrators are able to give the process an initial impetus, but ultimately RPA technology is more focused on self-service.

And according to Rinat Gimranov from Surgutneftegaz, RPA is a business analyst tool, that is, for the person who at the level of business processes set the context, defined the process, described the requirements, and put the robot into operation. {{quote'No, unfortunately, today there is hardly such a platform that allows robots to be handled exclusively by analysts,- he says. - In these processes today, IT specialists are also included, which will describe the features of client software somewhere and supplement something. Ideally, the launch of RPA mechanisms should be without IT. But today we cannot do without them - we are going through some transition period. }}

Maybe the state of transition explains the fact that 80% of today's RPA implementations, according to Anatoly Belaychuk, are modest in scale: the number of robots does not exceed 10? He believes that the "golden nuggets" - massive routine operations with simple logic - quickly end, and then the companies "rest on the wall." What are the problems?

RPA Implementation Issues

RPA projects only seem simple at first glance: automation of typical routine operations is a challenge? However, these projects are far from always successful. Moreover, EY analysts in their report "Get ready for robots. Why planning makes the difference between success and frustration "note that on average around the world from 30 to 50% of RPA projects are not successful.

Pavel Balashov, Head of Deloitte CIS Business Process Solutions Group, confirms: {{quote 'In Russia, there are examples of extremely successful implementations of robots into processes where companies have been able to increase their performance at times. Companies are happy to talk about such successes and share their experience. However, there are examples where robotization did not live up to its expectations. }}

Moreover, a large company can also comprehend failure, where, it seems, there are everything: good budgets, the best specialists, the opportunity to attract high-quality external assistance to the market. Marianne Danilina, head of the digital transformation department of Promsvyazbank, says that even the largest companies that can afford to create their own expertise center with the best specialists on the market are sometimes overly fond of innovative ideas. When the idea of technological innovation outweighs all other reasons for launching an RPA project, companies do not always think about economic effects. But then the case often does not go beyond the point application of this technology - so Marianne Danilina explains the phenomenon of Deloitte data - more than 50 processes are robotic only in 4% of companies.

In addition, we are going through a hype period in relation to RPA, and it usually corresponds to technology idealization and high expectations. With such an idealization, and if, moreover, organizations do not have a clear idea of ​ ​ their processes, the failure of the RPA project becomes very likely.

Pavel Balashov lists possible specific reasons for the failure: the improperly chosen process at the pilot robotization stage, the lack of necessary competencies within the company, the lack of interest on the part of management or employees, and insufficient awareness of the possibilities of robotization.

The implementation of RPA is a project with many details that need to be considered, moreover, comprehensively. Elena Zasseeva, chief specialist of the project support department of the IT Support, Development and Efficiency Department of TsBU TMK-Sinara LLC, says that thinking about the RPA project, it is first necessary to analyze the very possibility of using RPA technology.

The routine process, at first glance, the process can contain a large number of nuances that cannot be traditimatized, and therefore the participation of employees is required, for example, analytical activities, visual checks of data, "Elena Zasseyev shares her experience. - It is also necessary to take into account and evaluate the costs of implementing RPA technology and the current labor costs to support robots, release personnel as a result of RPA implementation.

For RPA, processes that have unpredictable external factors, use informal features, or the process is based on intuitive interpretations are absolutely not suitable.

An alternative is a process in which there is an interested customer, well-formalized process scenarios, and it itself is established, long and regular. If at the same time it is possible to integrate the entry/exit points for the robot into the general process, then such a process is suitable for RPA, Nikolai Dronnik is sure.

In other words, if a savory element is present in the process, it cannot be automated, at least without a complex intelligent add-on that helps make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. But these are not RPA, but systems of a different class.

A separate problem point is the planning of scaling robots. Single software robots in a large company cannot always pay off, but it is quite possible to get savings on a scale, experts say. But planning such scaling is often the task of a high level of management art.

According to Nikolai Kabanov, director of pre-sales training of UiPath in Russia and the CIS, RPA technology needs to be strengthened with the help of other technologies that help to effectively plan the sequence of robotic processes. The realization of this fact, according to the expert, led, in particular, to an increase in the popularity of Process Mining solutions. In addition, new-generation tools that help organize people and software robots to work together should help reduce the likelihood of failure. By analogy with collaborative industrial robots (cobots), which are designed to physically interact with people in a joint working environment, means of working together between people and software bots should appear. If in the first case, one of the key criteria for the quality of collaboration is physical security, then in the second - effective processing of errors that both parties can make.

To accompany robots, a permanent team of employees is needed, said Natalya Gaynulina, director of the multifunctional general service center X5 Retail Group. Even if the RPA project is executed with the participation of external consultants, you need your own constant team that can adapt robots to the changing conditions of business processes.

Managing the "labor discipline" of robots is another factor that often eludes the attention of the RPA project team. Robots may be mistaken, "do not go to work," idle, for example, if the interface of any information system has changed, they say in GVC "Russian Railways." Specialists who have learned to put hundreds of robots into service say that for this it was necessary to seriously rebuild the usual working processes.

In fact, we are talking not only about reorganizing existing processes in order to optimize them, but also about creating new ones necessary for detailed control over the functioning of robots. By and large, this is actually terra incognita - tasks that previously did not have to be solved by either IT specialists or professionals in the field of organizational management. It turns out that the term "digital labor" is not just a catchy marketing term - behind it is a real "workshop master," who knows how to establish the uninterrupted work of his "workers" in any situations, including force majeure.

And the term "force majeure" in this case is not just a figure of speech: digital employees are very sensitive to the slightest changes in the "production environment"! Even a minor change in the interface can cause a failure in its operation. And this kind of industry faced such problems for the first time.

When companies had only system integration, no one considered automating work through user interfaces. And when developing the interface, only user convenience was taken into account, "says Alexander Chernikov from First Bit. Office Sports. "- And with the development of RPA, it became important that program developers know what interface objects are used by robots and warn in advance about the upcoming change.

In other words, RPA mechanisms require constant detailed technical support from IT: any changes in business processes, in programs with which the bot interacts, can lead to a shutdown of its work, and this failure will violate a whole chain of automated tasks. Experts talk about the "fragility" of current bots, which can only be fought with the help of detailed formalization of all possible scenarios of its work and monitoring of all its states in real time. Experts advise, at a minimum, to pay extreme attention to the compilation of process maps, realizing that the software robot is not able to make any decisions.

Thus, any changes in business processes or applications require robot-level support, which involves additional costs.

First-generation robots are executive, but dumb: they have to be led by a pen, the design of the web page or the location of controls on the application screen has changed slightly, and the robot falls into a stupor, "notes Anatoly Belaychuk from Comindware.

In his opinion, the problem is added by the increasing use of cloud services:

There, such changes occur regularly, and no one asks the consent of users. Therefore, yes, of course, everyone expects at least the beginnings of intelligence from robots, which would make them less fragile.

Another significant source of RPA problems is related to the "quality" of the relevant business processes: RPA strengthens not only good processes, but also bad ones. If there is chaos in business processes, then the robotization of chaos will not give any positive result: robotization cannot fix bad processes, it simply accelerates them. Thus, if enterprises try to get a quick result from robotization and save on the audit and reengineering of business processes, they are very likely to create new problems that cross out all the initial good impulses.

Misestimating the cost of implementation is another "pitfalls" of RPA projects. The cost of implementing RPA does not aim at zero even in the most obvious cases, for example, with a reduction in the load of accountants or HR managers: the decrease in accounting FOT has the reverse side - the labor costs of IT specialists, which are the greater the more complex automation tasks they have to solve. Experts propose to be guided by an empirical rule: RPA technology is more expensive than API integrations by an order of magnitude, but RPA can be used where API integration is not possible.

Experts also talk about purely technological errors in the implementation of the RPA project. They can be fatal because the software robot is always closely linked to the company's IT landscape. T1 Integration provides a number of tips:

• Do not choose an RPA vendor based only on the platform popularity factor.
• Remember that robotic platforms always allow you to solve a certain range of problems. Therefore, one RPA platform cannot be considered as a universal tool for solving any problem.
• The RPA platform must have its own niche in the IT landscape, and the functionality of the platforms must always be tested on its landscape.

From an organizational point of view, the RPA project may fail due to the absence of an initiative project manager from the business, support from the IT department or the company's security service.

It is worth noting that increasing the "intelligence" of software bots, from which it is expected to increase the stability of their work, still does not eliminate all sources of problems of RPA projects. Problems with improper business processes in this case will not only not be eliminated, but will be further strengthened: if there is no order in business processes, then not only will it not be possible to get the effect of robotization, but also to formulate a task for intelligent RPA systems.