The Sri Lanka Association of Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) will host the first-ever Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Conference and Hackathon Awards on 13 February at the Galle Face Hotel. Organised by the SLASSCOM Business Process Management (BPM) Forum, this event has already seen many companies submitting entries for the virtual hackathon. 

The IT/BPM industry is recognised as a thrust industry within the National Export Strategy (NES) as is promoted globally as the ‘Island of Ingenuity’ for world-class knowledge solutions. The industry goal is to reach $ 5 billion by 2022, powered by 200,000 skilled jobs in the industry, along with a thriving ecosystem for startup companies.

The RPA Hackathon and Conference will comprise of two main segments. The Virtual RPA Hackathon allows you to submit your case study describing an application of RPA and resulting business value delivered to the customer. The RPA Conference is a half-day program to increase awareness about RPA with examples of implementation, details on service providers, followed by a panel discussion. The best case studies from the RPA Virtual Hackathon will be rewarded and recognised during the conference as well.  

RPA addresses services or activities in your organization which are repetitive processes. These are often time consuming and monotonous, whichleads to errors during processing. RPA aims to streamline these processes using technology, with minimum human intervention. This results in significant time and cost savings for the organisation. These forms of efficiency gains are called process automation. There are two categories of tools used to achieve process automation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligence Automation (IA). Many companies see this as a key technology to optimise processing costs for transactions and services. 

RPA uses software robots or agents to perform such routine business processes by mimicking the way that people interact with applications, through a user interface such as clicking buttons, typing login credentials, or reading from a word or PDF while following simple rules to make decisions. An example would be retrieving information from one system and transferring this to another system without manual intervention.

IA is a more advanced approach by automating non-routine tasks such as those involving intuition, judgment, creativity, persuasion or problem solving. 

This aims to create a substitute for human thinking capabilities. Although there have been some breakthroughs in this field, it’s still at a primitive stage to be adopted universally.

The event is sponsored by UiPath the Platinum Sponsor and Gold sponsors include WNS Global Services, RR Donnelley, Novigo Solutions and the HSBC Global Service Centre.

For more information on the RPA Conference on 13 February and for registrations, please visit;http://bit.ly/rpaconference2019.