ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION

 

 

Today most corporate companies use multiple internal and external applications to handle their day-to-day operations. These applications, often acquired in stages, fail to talk to each other. This gap is generally bridged by having an in-house team to handle the heavy maintenance of these applications that are mostly constituted of fetching data from one system, applying the required business logic and then feeding the derived information to the other system. With human resource being a precious commodity, one thing that can free these resources from their mundane operational duties is AUTOMATION.

 

Automation has 4 main advantages:

• Accuracy
• Speed
• Increased Productivity
• Frees up Human Resources for more critical and intelligence oriented tasks

 

To draw a parallel; in an industry which produces components, an assembly line will turn out a higher volume of end products with lower sub-standard pieces when it employs a mechanized assembly line rather than when those units are produced by hand.

 

AORTA is an automation engine and tool that simulates user actions for most repetitive and laborious processes. It integrates and bridges the gaps of connectivity and interoperability between third party and legacy systems without any change in the existing systems or workflow.

 

AORTA is capable of handling complex workflows involving multiple systems be it of any architecture - web, desktop or mainframe computers.

FEATURES

 

• Customer/ User creation and modification:   Can be deployed in scenarios where bulk customer/ user creation/ modification requests come in, where in most cases an entire team is dedicated to perform this repetitive activity. 
• Transaction Processing: In cases where information/ data is to be extracted from one system (application) and is to be manually fed into another system (application) after applying some standard business logic.
• Update HR Details: In most cases, a single system is in place where all the HR information is stored. HR records are often subjected to change and the same has to be reflected in the system. This is again done with a team dedicated for this activity.
• Report Generation: Business reports are often generated by compiling information extracted from various applications. Most teams have to generate such reports as a part of daily/weekly/monthly activity.
• Automated Testing: Most applications under development are often tested for the standard set of cases. Developers/Testers often do the same process of testing every time there is a change in the code.

DOES IT MAKE SENSE FOR OUR BUSINESS?

 

This understanding is at the heart of our recommendations when we at ZeroOne advocate for businesses with a large number of operational processes to automate them.

Automation using ZeroOne's AORTA Automation Engine has many benefits.

• It can deal with complex workflows
• It has a rules engine that can implement and enforce rules and mandatory procedures.
• It has error detection, threshold breach detection, alerting and reporting systems
• An advanced audit trail system will ensure accountability and transparency.
• It handles various application types - Web, Desktop, Mainframe and SSH based systems
• The single biggest advantage with our approach - No change to the existing application as the same actions that a user would perform is done by a program from the front end.

 

To put it in perspective, systems do not talk to each other and often a lot of processes are manually executed. By charting out the process flows and defining the rules, the resource is normally required to vet the data alone. (Even this step can be bypassed if the flow, rules and data are finite and inviolate.)

Integrated enterprises are far more productive and profitable than those who still throw people at these tasks thereby increasing manpower, and more importantly manpower management costs.

On successful completion of automation, customized reports will display data. The system can further have a roster of roles and rights for easy maintenance.

Our automation system is highly scalable in the fact that features like response time monitoring can be built in and activated. It can even return performance metrics.

ADVANTAGES

 

 

APPLICABLE SCENARIOS

 

Access Provisioning
With very large teams, User Access Provisioning is a key and time consuming activity with dedicated resources managing it. Access provisioning must comply with strict standards of request and approvals workflow and audit trails. Aorta can save valuable man-hours as well as ensure compliance with any SOP the organisation may have devised.

Data Processing
AORTA is an ideal fit for situations where data from disparate sources (applications, files, database, services, etc) needs to be extracted, transformed based on business rules and policies and then populated into another application.

 

Automated Testing
QA/QC is an important part of any development life-cycle ensuring that the software performs what it is intended or designed for. Functional testing takes up a large slice of this activity and involves the application of scenarios, test data, malformed data, validations, calculations etc. Even a minor change will require the entire system to be tested. AORTA provides a "write-once, run many times" script-based automated testing platform which can run these tests any number of times with just a click of a button and can also monitor response metrics from an end-user's perspective.

 

Updating HR Details
HR departments in companies have a constant influx of information for new and existing employees. This information has to be updated in the corresponding records in such a way that the change reflects across all systems. The information needs to be automatically accessible to the entire team, at any point in time. AORTA is used as a single system, which automates the task and stores the information, thereby replacing and reducing manpower used.

 

Report Generation
Reports generation is a crucial process in measuring the growth of a business. These usually need to be generated at varying time intervals like daily/ weekly/ monthly by either an individual or a team. The compiling of information that is extracted from various applications is made simpler by AORTA.

 

End-of-Period processes
Most IT operations involve periodical closing processes (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) and typically following pre-defined routines, checks and processes involving multiple applications in a specific order. These operations are critical for performance and continuity of the applications. AORTA will do this for you with 100% process compliance and on-time with notifications and alerts for error and non-performance scenarios.

 

Integration of Disparate and Third-party Systems
Integrating third party application, even where APIs or data end-points are available, can be a time consuming and expensive exercise and sometimes integration may not even be possible. Also, data and data-structure disparities means performing varying degrees of ETL to make the data compatible with target systems. AORTA can solve this problem by reading data "As Presented" by the source application and then performing transformations on the data to make it compatible.

 

AORTA CASELETS

 

Case 1: Electronic Credit System (ECS) Processing

A large multi-national bank was using SIX team members to run their complete ECS processing. The process involved various steps like downloading data, sorting as per branches, posting and processing on the ECS system and finally updating on the RBI site. The process was run manually, leading to a lot of issues like - errors, inability to plan for volume of transactions and a very high cost per transaction.

 

AORTA iBot was customized and installed to automate the ECS processing - all within two weeks. The six member team could now handle much more work, apart from the ECS process, which was predominantly run by AORTA. Apart from this efficiency, larger volumes could be handled more efficiently and without any human intervention. Additionally, the error rates dropped to almost NIL. The largest component of saving was the 600% savings in cost of running the ECS process.

 

Case 2: IT Operations

A team of 15 people was handling the IT operations in a large multinational bank. The process involved running batch files, extracting data and sending beginning-of-day and end-of-day reports. This routine process was run across 60 internal applications everyday. The process was fraught with many errors and high costs.

 

AORTA iBot was launched in a lead-time of 2 months. AORTA helped automate the entire process, while maintaining complete sanctity of existing processes and applications. The automation started with the user generated action and allowed for due authorization required as per the Bank's norms. It also enabled generation of emails with embedded reports, thus reducing costs, human resources and errors.

 

Case 3: User Accounts Management Process

A large Multinational Bank had 3 workflows and 25 internal applications that needed to be navigated to complete the process of User Account Management. The process was repetitive and the information had to be taken from one application and then verified or updated on another, for the appropriate rights to be assigned to every specific user. An increase in volume led to increase in team size, time taken to complete the process and errors.

 

With the implementation of AORTA, the entire process got automated without changing any element in the process flow. Necessary authorizations and monitoring were incorporated in line with the bank's norms. At 5000 user accounts per day, the resource requirement and cost of operation was reduced by 50% and further reduced to 25% when the volumes went up to 10000 user accounts.