A Fractal Solution To Automation

Asheesh Mehra, Group CEO & Co-Founder of AntWorks, talks about their novel approach to crack all four types of data—structured, unstructured, inferred, image—and leverage RPA to power their Integrated Automation Platform

- Sunil Rajguru

What RPA is and what it isn’t

If I define it, RPA is a data transport engine or tool – where it picks up data from Point A and deposits it at Point B. So RPA has been around in the back office for a few decades. It wasn’t called RPA, but a data transcoding engine or an Excel Macro. The whole industry came into being around 2010-11, when a governance layer and a reporting layer was put on top of it and it was packaged beautifully as RPA. So it’s not what it promises to be: Robotic Process Automation. The key word there being: “process”. RPA on its own is not a tool that can be a process. It is a tool that can automate certain tasks of a business process.

Let’s say data from an invoice needs to be extracted and put into the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform that is being used by an enterprise, be it Tally or SAP or Oracle. So RPA is the tool that is used after data has been ingested or extracted using a data ingestion platform like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or cognitive machine reading. When you have data available in an Excel, RPA uses business rules to pick up data from that and put it into the ERP that then leads to an invoice getting paid. The same is for claims.

Can RPA take some decisions and apply business rules, provide certainty for the information that is being put into the claim system, and then ask the claim system to pay that particular insurance claim? RPA cannot do that. The technology is not built to do that.

On the difference in approach to RPA…