A Smart Bot for the Enterprise

June 14, 2017

Don’t just automate the factory floor. There’s technology for the enterprise, too!

So, it’s noon and you are skimming through Facebook (taking a much-needed break from the tedious task of inputting invoice data to the enterprise resource planning system (ERP). Suddenly, your Facebook newsfeed—including political rants and pictures of your friend’s steak dinner last night—is interrupted by an advertisement for Grundens Deck-Boss boots. One click, and you're off to do some online shopping.

But you are left wondering: How did Facebook know I needed new footwear for the fishing boat?

The answer, my friend, is in the invisible web where marketers hang out and use human behavior analytics to capture patterns. It works—because you bought the boots, didn’t you?

Well, if it works on the Internet, it will work in the enterprise. That’s where Automation Anywhere, a provider of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes in. This year, the company announced the availability of IQ Bot, software bots capable of studying, learning and mimicking human behavior for intelligent process automation. By combining cognitive abilities with practical, rule-based RPA capabilities, organizations can automate business processes end-to-end and run them independently with minimal human intervention.

For example, that mundane ERP order entry stuff you’re doing can automatically be generated by the cognitive bot. First, you train the bot to extract and order the data in a way that makes sense for you by showing it the fields representing the pieces of data in the document. It will learn to recognize patterns and pick up data from the invoices in the future and export it to a CSV file, for example.

Ultimately, an automated end-to-end order entry system will reduce errors and save time—so you can do more web surfing!

About the Author

Stephanie Neil | Editor-in-Chief, OEM Magazine

Stephanie Neil has been reporting on business and technology for over 25 years and was named Editor-in-Chief of OEM magazine in 2018. She began her journalism career as a beat reporter for eWeek, a technology newspaper, later joining Managing Automation, a monthly B2B manufacturing magazine, as senior editor. During that time, Neil was also a correspondent for The Boston Globe, covering local news. She joined PMMI Media Group in 2015 as a senior editor for Automation World and continues to write for both AW and OEM, covering manufacturing news, technology trends, and workforce issues.

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