RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. This is a new and fancy terminology used in the IT industry for automation. After introducing various tools that would improve an employee's life, many people lost their jobs because automation took away their jobs. Embracing the technology is very important. We have to build tools to make the lives of the employees easier. At the same time when some tools are developed, it is obvious that many people lose their jobs.
Taking away jobs
Sometimes when there is a need for 5 developers, process automation can take away the job of 3 people and just retain only 2 people in the team. This is very common. Our growth in a company should always be in such a way that we should depend on the type of skills that cannot be replaced by automation or a bot. It is easier said than experienced. The reason is because there is always some innovation or the other happening and some innovations are capable of taking away the jobs of many people.
Companies have a pressure to bring in automation and tools to reduce the headcount. This is a very common thing and it can happen in many companies. There are companies where the senior most resources might work only a little but they won't embrace new technologies. Innovations like these are very good for managing the work with a robot instead of actual developers.
Fancy microservices
Sometimes when we hear about RPA, it might sound like it is something new or a great feature. Of course, it can be a great thing to help the clients but we have to understand that it is just fancy terminology but it is another microservice that is working for a specific task alone. Sometimes the company might be spending a lot of money on this which can even be more than what would have been the cost if the feature was inside the product itself.
They are okay with that cost because ultimately it is helping in reducing some headcount and automation is used in the process.
Actual use of RPA
Sometimes in a big product team, there will be very little bandwidth to work on a particular feature. From the development team's perspective, it can be low priority requirement and from the business side, it is a requirement that adds more value to both clients as well as internal employees. In such cases, it can even act as a method to reduce the head count. When this is the case, the bandwidth of the development or R&D team can be very limited and they may not be able to work on a feature like that. This is where RPA comes into the picture.
A separate team called RPA is approached and with the tools and facility the team has, they will be able to build some wrapper solution for a particular problem that otherwise should have been in the product itself. Sometimes RPA takes the lead forever to hold that feature but in some cases, the R&D team decides to include that feature in the product itself and the help from RPA might no longer be required.
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