Myself, Tom and Katie Walker from our Sales and Marketing team were lucky enough to go down to London this week to attend DIN’s - Digital Worker 24 Hackathon.
Heading down on the train I was trying to cram in as much information as possible around RPA’s and what they do, to get a better understanding of how if would fit in with Bromford and the design brief for the hackathon.
By the way, if you didn’t know RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation.
RPA is the technology that allows us to configure computer software, to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to execute a business process. RPA robots utilise the user interface to capture data and manipulate applications just like humans do. This allows them to interpret, trigger responses and communicate with other systems in order to perform a variety of repetitive tasks. With a big added bonus - RPA robot’s never sleep, make zero mistakes and costs a lot less than an employee.
The brief our team picked was Property Market Benchmarking. We decided to use Zoopla which would allow us to use automation to access and manipulate data available on these sites to help make informed decisions around new build valuations for rental, sales and shared ownership markets.
Using BluePrism and with lots of help from the teams at Human+ and Thoughtonomy, in less than 24 hours we managed to build a process that allowed us to track information from an email request, to search for current house prices using a specific location, and house type, which would then generate an email back to the sender with the correct information they required. Not bad really, considering the three of us have no tech background.
RPA allows organisations to automate at a fraction of the cost and time and is a non-intrusive way of integrating with the existing infrastructure without causing disruption to underlying systems.
As always, it was a great event hosted by Ian at DIN, and we’ve taken away so much valuable learning. By embracing these new technologies, it’s clear we can drive business performance and free up colleagues time.
We are going to continue looking at how we can integrate RPA into our processes here at Bromford, so watch this space.