This all the turmoil and excitement around “RPA” reminds me a situation that I witnessed two decades ago. A company had a process of placing orders for products for resale that was completely manual - some people decided what kind of articles and quantity to order, others typed these orders into the computer system - line by line. They still work like that?
One of the guys who was doing this dull and stupid job decided to simplify his life. The list of items to be ordered was sent to him in an Excel file (someone else had previously done another dummy job). Then it had to be entered into the computer using a Unix terminal. Our hero came up with the idea of writing a macro in Visual Basic that would simulate his daily manual work - read the article number and its quantity from the file and then enter this data in the terminal. Sequence: 'copy', 'paste', 'enter', 'sendKeys' ... Thus, he launched the first "Robotic Automation" without even knowing it.
I have always believed that IT has the best marketing of all industries. Others – hold their beer! Tech companies has always been able to sell the greatest nonsense to rich organizations. We are in 2021 and the overlays for outdated software are sold as "robots".
