4 ms·

What is RPA?

by auxym 8y ago

What is RPA?

czl_my 8y ago
Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath
jwally 8y ago
Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
- jwally 8y ago
  Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
  - gnychis 8y ago
    Please see my response! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835
eksemplar 8y ago
It’s a macro you program to use it systems through the UI. People already mentioned blueprism, uipath and automationanywhere, there’s a few others. It’s an immensely valuable digitization too in enterprise setups where you operate s lot of closed and/or legacy systems. Like we operate around 600 it systems, and very few of them talk to each other. So if you want to transfer data from one system to another, you’d need to have someone manually do it. Or you could automate it by using RPA software. Basically it’s what will do to the office space what the assembly lines did to factories. It’s also really terrible, because it breaks when the UI changes. But when companies refuse to sell open apis, it’s what you have to work with. The most ironic part is the IT companies that now sell RPA solutions for their own shitty software, but that’s the world we live in.

What is RPA?

by auxym 8y ago

What is RPA?

czl_my 8y ago

Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath

jwally 8y ago

Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.

jwally 8y ago
Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
- gnychis 8y ago
  Please see my response! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835

eksemplar 8y ago

It’s a macro you program to use it systems through the UI. People already mentioned blueprism, uipath and automationanywhere, there’s a few others. It’s an immensely valuable digitization too in enterprise setups where you operate s lot of closed and/or legacy systems. Like we operate around 600 it systems, and very few of them talk to each other. So if you want to transfer data from one system to another, you’d need to have someone manually do it. Or you could automate it by using RPA software. Basically it’s what will do to the office space what the assembly lines did to factories. It’s also really terrible, because it breaks when the UI changes. But when companies refuse to sell open apis, it’s what you have to work with. The most ironic part is the IT companies that now sell RPA solutions for their own shitty software, but that’s the world we live in.