Re:My biggest mistake as an RPA developer
by honey-badger on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @02:28AM
(#30763246)
Precisely. In some narrowly defined scenarios where data migration is otherwise like untangling a giant ball of yarn, RPA serves an invaluable need. However, the manner in which it is marketed is out of proportion to the narrower scope in which it is valuable.
Enter a third party vendor I'd worked with before. They specialize in archiving data from EMRs into a standalone searchable database. $50k and two months, they're done. The EMR has an IE only UI, and a newer cross platform UI. We demonstrated how to extract the data required for the new owner, and they created an RPA workflow to "print" to PDF 5k medical records. It's the exact same output the EMR vendor would have given us, but they'd have used their own internal tools to do it, but they'd have taken 3-6 times longer to do it.
RPA is just screen scraping, basically, and sometimes it's still useful.