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Does anyone know exactly what his "bots" were automating? Article is low on that content.

• anfractuosity 7y ago
  Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation which makes it sound like robotic process automation, might replicate people interacting with GUI programs? But it's still not clear to me, as to what kind of programs they're using it for.
  • andylynch 7y ago
    100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it’s not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.
• jolmg 7y ago
  Their site[1] is low on content, too. It might be that what they were automating was different on each customer company. It's only a guess, but it seems viable that they might go to a company, see what easily automatable tasks they're doing by hand, and offer to write a script for that task. If that was the case, I wonder how they managed to monetize it that much. [1] https://rpa-holdings.com/en/ https://rpa-holdings.com/en/
• sjg007 7y ago
  After reading a couple of case studies on their website, it looks like GUIs... I'm guessing they use something similar to AutoIT with screen recording. I worked on a lot of AutoIT back in the day... This is probably a good market to get into for any saavy entrepreneur.
• eastbayjake 7y ago
  A lot of these RPA processes use tools like UiPath to automate clicks on a Windows desktop computer. The article's stated use case (scanning paper applications and entering it into the system) sounds like OCR getting text off the page, doing some sanity checks, then keying it into the system with automated clicks in a VM. Ordinarily you'd just expose an API to pass through that data, but for lots of legacy systems it's faster and less expensive to have an RPA bot just literally key data into the old interface. Source: the enterprise things these eyes have seen