Ep. 40: Loreal Jiles - How Real is RPA in Finance and Accounting?

"Govern Your Bots!" by Loreal Jiles (Strategic Finance, January 1, 2020): https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/january-2020-govern-your-bots/

Links to learn RPA Development or other things about RPA Tools for Free

1. UiPath: https://www.uipath.com/rpa/academy (The name of the RPA tool is UiPath and this site is to UiPath Academy).
2. Automation Anywhere: https://university.automationanywhere.com/ (The name of the RPA tool is Automation Anywhere and this site is to Automation Anywhere University)

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host, Adam Larson, and I'm happy to bring you episode number 40 of our series. Today's conversation is between my cohost Mitch and Loreal Jiles IMA's director of research for digital technology and finance transformation. Their discussion revolves around RPA and the practicality of robots and accounting. So, let's transition over and hear what Loreal has to say.

Mitch: (00:31)

We keep hearing so much about RPA, but I'd like to kind of start off on the right page here. Can you tell us exactly what is RPA?

Loreal: (00:45)

Certainly. So RPA stands for robotic process automation, and my personal definition is RPA is a technology that enables a virtual robot or a bot, as we call them, more casually to emulate human interaction with computer applications to execute processes. And so in planar terms, what that really means is the bot mimics the clicks and the keystrokes of humans to perform a process on a computer. It can navigate through desktop or web based applications, and it can do all of that simply by accessing what's called the user interface or the UI. And the user interface is the part of an application that all of us as humans see and interact with. There is another part of each application that's in the back end and that's where traditional computer science majors or programmers access that to right code to either modify the application or to automate things that way. Right? Historically, the only way to automate things was to access the backend of the application. What RPA does is it allows us to do things, things that historically businesses, professionals or non it professionals would not be able to do because now without having to access the back end of the application where there's admittedly a bit more risk, we simply record the keystrokes but clicks the type, of the human throughout the process and allowed the robot to replicate those steps. After we've documented it in sequential format in the required, I'd say the required format that's necessary. So what's really cool with it, I think is as opposed to going in the back end again, the automation happens right in the front of the screen. And in some instances you can even watch the robot perform your process. Um, so RPA for me is the easiest way to automate processes for non it professionals.

Mitch: (02:42)

So you just said it right there. non-IT in our audiences, finance and accounting. So how real is RPA in finance and accounting? What are some of the typical uses that you've come across?

Loreal: (02:52)

Oh, I think it's incredibly real. I'd say first off, it's, it's very real across many. And so McKinsey published a study just a few months ago highlighting RPA offers potential ROI of 30 to 200%, and in fairness with the right selection principles for a process, those projections aren't incredibly conservative. I start there because nearly all enterprises who have begun RPA journeys regardless of their industry, they started in the finance and accounting department. And so that means that the thousands of companies that are using RPA today, over 70% of them started in finance and accounting. And that's incredibly powerful because it says to us as finance and accounting professionals, how do we want to be impacted by the technology? Do we want to be the recipients of it, if you will, or to be on the front end. And my encouragement to finance and accounting professionals is to consider being on the front end of it. The other thing I think I'll highlight is, although it's tempting to say, um, we're not developing bots or are developing robots themselves or actually developing processes that robots will perform. And the only thing we have to do to do that is effectively to tell the robot what steps to take. Yeah. Who knows those steps better than the people that actually perform them. Yeah. So my mantra is more can we have finance and accounting professionals developing these processes as opposed to solely it professionals. That doesn't mean everyone will be converted to a developer, but you could play a critical role in either process requirements gathering in, in exploring what's needed to be able to facilitate or progressed the implementation, if you will. And so I think in that space, we're seeing something where every company, or just about every company that starting RPA journeys is starting in finance and accounting. Our processes lend themselves a bit more. It's a automation because of the cyclical nature because some of them are routine just by nature of what we're doing for month end close or quarter end close for example. And so I think in the spirit of that we as a profession will see a ton of this, for those of us who haven't already been exposed to it, significantly,

Mitch: (05:10)

Well, in my own personal research trying to learn about RPA and how finance really fits in, I came across democratization of RPA and quite honestly, I'm hoping you can give us a little better definition than what I read online.

Loreal: (05:23)

Oh, certainly. Yeah. So democratization of RPA is a phrase that summarizes the concept of a bot for every employee and some people go so far as to see a bot for every human. I'm not trying to go that far, but the concept of a bot for every employee means that if I sit in any corporate setting, despite the company, just like I have a laptop and it's automatic, that when I start working for that company, they will give me a laptop. And that laptop will have Microsoft office suite when it, for example, there's an by some people or envision that I will also have a bot on my laptop as well and I'll have software that allows me to automate some of my processes on demand and in real time. And my robot that sits on my laptop will effectively become my personal assistant in that world. I think we've, we've got a little wait before we can get there. So would I ask myself if I truly believe in democratization of RPA? Yes. I think it's a far off, but in fairness, no one thought we would have a laptop when every desk, just a few short decades ago, no one thought we'd have effectively a computer in the palm of our hands or in our back pockets. And so what I think we have to do before we can truly realize something like democratization of RPA is that the technologies themselves, the software vendors, we'll have to continue to progress the user friendly nature of their tools. There are a couple of tools that are more user friendly than others. And there's a recent Forrester report that was published earlier this quarter that tells us who the leading RPA players are. And I think the top three that they've highlighted are ...