As computers become smarter they are going to take over many of the mundane tasks now performed by people.
Robotic process automation (RPA) will do many jobs better and quicker than their human counterparts, releasing people to do the creative and innovative things that will set their organisations apart.
RPA has been a dream for many years now, but has stopped short of becoming a reality because the tools available to create the automated processes are themselves complex to use and manage.
Until now, that is: Roboteur from SpacePencil is an easy-to-use and inexpensive tool that lets just about anyone create robotic processes to automate repetitive and mundane tasks.
“At the end of the day, we believe the decision to use RPA should come down, quite simply, to return on investment (ROI),” says Graham Fry, MD of SpacePencil.
This ROI includes money saved, and more. “The moment tasks become mundane, people do them in a rush and make mistakes – and there is a cost involved in that.”
ROI should also include the increase in staff productivity and creativity once people are deployed away from tedious jobs.
A typical RPA project today comes in at costs not necessarily justified by the tasks being automated. On top of that, around half of RPA projects fail.
Fry believes that, by putting a simple and easy-to-use tool into the hands of coders, business analysts and business owners, RPA can become a much more successful and cost-effective exercise.
He explains that Roboteur is an RPA platform and development environment that makes it simple and inexpensive to automate processes.
“With Roboteur, it is all about the ROI,” says Fry. “Anything else is noise. Why spend a million dollars to develop a pen that works in space when a pencil does the same job?”
Barry Buck, chief technology officer of SpacePencil, says the Roboteur design team aimed to give the developer more control, with a visual programming platform and business tool to help users define automated tasks. “We wanted to make it user-friendly with not much training required.
“Roboteur ticks all those boxes, plus it is granular enough to handle edge cases as well as more complex scenarios.
“Essentially, it is a visual progamming platform with a lot of intelligence built in. It is different from the status quo because it’s built on new technology and is distributable – you can run it as a desktop app or on a web browser, in the cloud or locally.
“It is a general automation tool that builds out the conceptual layers that are the entry point for RPA tools; and, as a granular visual programming tool, it is powerful and complete.”
Roboteur is available for either an annual fee or monthly subscription. Contact SpacePencil for a demo or for a trial version. Mail management@spacepencil.co.uk or look find more information at www.spacepencil.co.uk.