Issues of RPA implementation in product design and development work ①

In recent years, laws for working style have been reorganized and as a result the work efficiency has been required in high levels, improving work efficiency of routine works at product design and development sites is becoming an issue.

By utilizing RPA (Robotic Process Automation), it is possible to record and reproduce human work procedures, and let computer performs routine works / repetitive works without programming by means of automation becomes possible.

It's tends to hear easy that this will solve the problem, but the reality is that it's not that so.

Here, we will introduce the issues when implementing general RPA to the product design and development site with concrete examples.

Processes that can easily obtain the benefits of RPA

RPA can easily obtain the benefits in scope of cost reduction / error prevention / and productivity improvement in the following operations:

• Repetitive operations according to certain rules
• Handling fully-structured and organized data
• Operations with work procedures that are standardized

In a large-scale processing and repetitive work that meets the above conditions, it is easy to obtain great benefits because the RPA operates for a long period of time under certain conditions.

The following tasks are suitable for implementing RPA.

• Processing of transaction information at financial institutions such as bank
• Organizing customer information in the insurance industry
• Automating formatted paperwork of standard documents in local services, government offices, city hall etc.

Fields where the benefits of RPA are difficult to obtain: Product design and development work

Comparing from the above work, how about the work in product design and development sites?

Detailed processes with various options are simultaneously & continuously to be executed, such as acquiring information from a database / creating data using CAD / inputting forms through Excel / storing data on an intranet, etc.

Since the process of product design and development work is subdivided as above, the runtime of RPA operation against the entire work is short, thus benefits of RPA will be difficult to obtain. As a result, even if RPA is implemented into product design and development work, the challenge is that it tends to be less cost effective.

For such issues, it is required to analyze the work at it’s product development site in detail and combine RPA, CAD template, and Agile Automation (CAD extension function) to build the optimum solution for each issue.

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