A Smart Bot for the Enterprise

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!