Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
RPA is an application of technology, controlled by business logic, rules and structured inputs, with the objective to automate business processes. RPA promises to help organizations eliminate labor intensive tasks, freeing up valuable human resources to focus on activities that add values to the organizations.
RPA technology consists of software robots (bots) that mimic a human worker, and are commonly deployed to achieve low-medium complex automations, such as following simple, repeatable rules to process data, search the internet to gather, store and manipulate user specified information.
What are the common RPA applications?
- Customer service: RPA can help companies offer better customer service by automating contact centre tasks, including uploading scanned documents and verifying information for automatic approvals or rejections.
- Accounting: Organizations can use RPA for general accounting, operational accounting, transactional reporting and budgeting.
- Human resources: RPA can automate HR tasks, including on-boarding and off-boarding, updating employee information and timesheet submission processes.
What are the benefits of applying RPA?
- RPA removes routine and repetitive tasks from knowledge worker who can then focus more on work that requires more creativity, induces more joys and hence satisfactions, and work that adds more values to the university, and ultimately the society
- RPA utilizes the user interface to capture data and interact with applications just as humans do, but faster and with fewer errors.
- RPA is distinct from other process automation technologies because it can be implemented quickly and efficiently without changing the existing technology stacks – enabling our university to automate tasks and integrate systems which would otherwise be too complex, costly, or time consuming to address.
Where do we use RPA in HKUST?
Electronic payment verifications for Student Payment Team
Bots were trained to handle the daily electronic payment verifications from various e-Payment services providers (PPS, EPS, Visa, Master, Jetco, UnionPay, etc). Bots import the transactions to our e-payment system as well as Finance management System (FMS) and mimic our FO users to spot for exceptions and send emails to corresponding user departments automatically asking for confirmation of the payment. Bots also facilitate FO to complete all the manual tasks in e-payment system after receiving user confirmation.