6 minute read
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Automated Workflow
the company’s website. Examples of information that the system can provide include where lubricants are available for purchase, range of available pack sizes and general information regarding the technical properties of specific products. The company has also reportedly integrated a virtual assistant called Amelia into its business model to respond to inquiries more efficiently from suppliers regarding invoicing and it believes the future of AI in its industry will see a significant increase in unmanned and automated facilities.
Sinopec has a long-term plan to roll out construction of 10 ‘intelligent’ plants as part of an objective to achieve a 20 percent reduction in operation costs. In April 2017, Huawei and Sinopec announced a collaborative effort to design a “smart manufacturing platform.” AI is one of eight core capabilities of the platform which will deliver a centralized method of data management and support integration of data across multiple applications used to manage factory operations. AI would serve to establish the rules and models that would inform how data is interpreted and offer opportunities for improvement in factory operations.
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Kyos also uses ML in areas like renewables and PPAs where it creates simulations for price with volumes of production using ML. It also uses ML techniques to look at historical data and project that forward, finding ML to be a robust method to handle large quantities of historical data efficiently.
AI and ML, especially combined with automation, do appear to be attracting a great deal of interest and investment and we do expect to see it deployed with increasing frequency across all areas of a commodity business.
According to Investopedia, Robotic process automation (RPA) refers to software that can be easily programmed to do basic tasks across applications just as human workers do. The software robot can be taught a workflow with multiple steps and applications. RPA software is designed to reduce the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on employees and is seen as having benefits such as reduced costs and fewer errors. While there has been significant interest in RPA for areas like financial settlement, scheduling, risk management and so on, ComTech hasn’t seen much evidence of its use beyond automations of various aspects of workflow via a few select RPA based tools. However, RPA and automated workflows are taking off in many industries and as an example, an Accenture study2 determined that over 43% of consumer-packaged goods (CPG) executives indicate their firms already employ automation to cut costs and promote efficiency.
2 https://www.accenture.com/t20170926T105943Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-61/Accenture-Strategy-Consumer-Goods-Workforce-POV.pdf
Though anyone who has ever worked in a commodity trading organization or business unit knows that there are many examples of highly repetitive and labor-intensive areas that might seem to benefit from automation and RPA, often these processes are also prone to exceptions that would require frequent human intervention. Nonetheless, it does seem that trading could be an area is ripe for automation and the widespread use of software robots.
The application of RPA first requires the business process first be digitized. By looking for those highly repetitive and labor-intensive areas of the business process, opportunities for RPA can be identified and acted upon. While this may include specific trade office business processes, it can also be used to automate application interoperability at the desktop and other such activities.
Despite the fact the market continues to digitalize and there is promise for additional adoption of automated tools, Comtech’s research did not find massive uptake of RPA in the industry. Further, it seems that some of the early vendors interested in marketing to the space have now largely backed away as projects have been sparser than anticipated. Despite that, advanced workflow solutions have found widespread adoption usually as a part of other solutions like CTRM and CM. Many CTRM and CM solutions now come complete with programmable and configurable workflow and approvals, and it has arguably become a standard feature of this class of software.
Settlement Processes
Settlement is an area where RPA has been used and one case was noted in a press announcement in late 2017 by Pioneer (now Hitachi) to announce that it had joined forces with its longstanding customer Essent, in a POC to apply RPA to settlement processes in the Retail Energy Management group. “Innogy’s Essent is focusing strongly on digitization in the energy transition. For REM we accomplished that task with TRMTracker, and its automation enables us to now apply RPA, gain experience with the concept, and prove the added value for Essent Finance,” said Pim Flink, Senior Controller at Essent. “This is pioneering work, and our results have been very promising in how it will increase our operational excellence.” This is now implemented and in production at Essent in the areas of generating a settlement report and running calculations where it saves manual work and frees up workers to work on more creative activities.
Utility Uses
RPA is often used in what may be termed a utility-type function – much like that presented above, where it can be used to assist a user navigate many systems when managing common business processes. Some of the most common examples include,
• Web Site Scraping Energy and commodity firms have access to and require a lot of data from a variety of sources like price and weather services, SCADA and operational feeds from various assets, inventory systems and so on. Often much of this data is available on web sites but accessing that information on a regular basis can be a time-consuming process. RPA software can be used to scrape those web sites on a regular basis (such as finance-related trading sites, futures trading sites, commodity trading sites, news media sites) and extract specific information, summarize it and present it to those who need it.
• Email processing Assisting with the processing of large numbers of incoming customer e-mail is an area where RPA can be used to sort out the most common queries and route them. It can also respond to the sender with an interim message of receipt.
• Data Transfer Using RPA to transfer data between different solutions is another area of use that is in fact like helping users navigate between different systems in order to do their jobs more efficiently. A similar use case is to extract data from paper forms using character recognition.
Other areas that show promise for RPA and workflowtype tools are in a traditional back-office context as well as in core business processes, particularly in retail energy, such as: • Automated tariff adjustment calculation and posting • Customer onboarding – checking and validating customer data • Fast meter take over using automatic termination with other providers • Meter data and bill data processing – meter data validation • Order management • Complaint’s resolution
Given the impacts of the pandemic and the resultant work from home requirements, workflow and automation has been increasingly used to provide an extra level of control over key processes. Many CTRM and CM vendors embed definable and customizable workflow/approvals within their solutions to help users model and manage business process administration within the solution. This is then used to ensure that critical activities are undertaken and completed by users through the solution.
