# What industries or working sectors can make use of RPA?



## megha001

I would like to have some opinions on applications of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) in different sectors.


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## FrancSevin

First off, welcome to our Forum!

Now for RPA.  Very useful technology.  Whilst it will replace a human worker, or team of workers, it does replicate their efforts with more precision, and dependable realization of consistent quality.  Thus, affording the delivery of expectations to the customer. My youngest brother, who's family lived in my basement for years while he studied the technology, is a world-renowned engineer of RPA.  His work can be found in auto plants all over the globe.


That said, I do not use it.  My company is a custom Contract-Packager and we found RPA cannot pay for itself over a reasonable time.  For what we do, the flexibility of the human mind is priceless.  However, robots tend to show up every day, on time, and ready to perform as expected.

RPA requires a consistent backlog of work, particularly consistent and repeatable assignments of effort. Tech's for the RPA are high paying and rare, therefore costly unless work is steady and of sufficient volume to justify the salaries required to attain qualified personnel. Put together, these factors make RPA difficult to financially justify.

All that said, I recommend them were applicable. Especially in manufacturing.


In what business are you involved


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## waybomb

I've designed and built robot loading of packaging machines. ABB seems to have the best support. They would know robotics firms in whatever industry you are in.
I designed a two robot loading system. An ABB IRB for loading 6 or 7 labels into formed pockets on a Multivac R245 along with a flexpicker that loaded 2 summer sausages at a time into those pockets after the labels were inserted. 
The IRB would grab the labels with custome designed EOATs for each type of label, and if any of the suction cups failed to pull a vacuum, the arm would stop and try again. If no label, the machine would continue to run, an alarm annunciated. The flex picker would than not fill that pocket with summer sausage. If we went more then 2 cycles with no action, it shut down, and ran whatever product was in pockets continue on, until the line was cleared.
Since the flexpicker e.o.a.t was actually touching food, it would clean itself every 150 picks by dipping itself and fairly violently shake itself in and out of the sanitizer solution. We were loading 120 summer sausages per minute with it.
It's amazing the things that can be done.
What are you looking to do?
Really neat stuff is the collaborative robots. They are starting to handle heavier weights now.
Then of course, there is Boston Dynamics that build humanoids.


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## chowderman

I used a lot of ABB stuff in the early machining cells - they could handle the mass required.
the real leap methinks was digital vision - that eliminated so much in 'orientation' issues that had to be solved by mechanical conveying/etc.
bar codes and scanning provided physical and part verification - and enabled 'random order' picking/packing/handling/etc.
one of favorite gadgets was the three legged overhead pick/place style.


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## waybomb

That's the IRB 360 flexpicker. Three arms, with full motion. And the shaft down the middle that allows spinning the eoat.
When I first set it up, I had the acceleration up a <bit> too high. Picked up the first sausage, an 8ounce piece, and proceded to the place position. The accleration was so high, the sausage seperated from the eoat, bounced off the cell, and hit the other side of the cell. Oops. Amazing the acceleration of those servos.


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## megha001

FrancSevin said:


> First off, welcome to our Forum!
> 
> Now for RPA.  Very useful technology.  Whilst it will replace a human worker, or team of workers, it does replicate their efforts with more precision, and dependable realization of consistent quality.  Thus, affording the delivery of expectations to the customer. My youngest brother, who's family lived in my basement for years while he studied the technology, is a world-renowned engineer of RPA.  His work can be found in auto plants all over the globe.
> 
> 
> That said, I do not use it.  My company is a custom Contract-Packager and we found RPA cannot pay for itself over a reasonable time.  For what we do, the flexibility of the human mind is priceless.  However, robots tend to show up every day, on time, and ready to perform as expected.
> 
> RPA requires a consistent backlog of work, particularly consistent and repeatable assignments of effort. Tech's for the RPA are high paying and rare, therefore costly unless work is steady and of sufficient volume to justify the salaries required to attain qualified personnel. Put together, these factors make RPA difficult to financially justify.
> 
> All that said, I recommend them were applicable. Especially in manufacturing.
> 
> 
> In what business are you involved


Thanks for sharing your insights 
I work in the IT sector.


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## waybomb

So I looked up RPA. Has nothing to do with the robots I worked with! Interesting stuff.


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## FrancSevin

waybomb said:


> So I looked up RPA. Has nothing to do with the robots I worked with...


YEs, it is different in that it is about managing data in real time. But it is virtually necessary to manage Robotic processing plant operations because of the data feeds to management.  Whilst a few bots in the manufacturing process can be managed by humans, and entire plant producing cars or dishwashers, is a lot of information. I can't imagine not having RPA.
That said, and from my perspective, without robotic manufacturing why would one need RPA?

Unless the processes were massive in volume and scale, why would one need either?

Of course, once the government has the ability to spy on every individual, I would guess they could use it.  Puts us one step closer to,,,, "The Matrix"


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## eshikakhanna08

Robotic Process Automation is one of the finest technologies that offer next-level efficiency and accuracy in performing day-to-day business tasks! RPA tools can manage the operations & processes the same way humans do, these tools are good at doing repeatable, rule-based tasks like processing claims, customer data, etc.

RPA has several applications in different industries like Healthcare, Insurance, Fintech, Human Resources & Retail. RPA has wide-ranging benefits that can improve your business services and productivity. I read a few use cases here


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## FrancSevin

Being a bit confused by some of the posts here i checked with my brother today. here is some of his response,,,;

_Yes, we do enterprise automation, which RPA is one aspect. The robots that are referred to are really digital robots. Little snippets of code that replace eyes on screens and fingers on keyboards. Most RPA solutions use a “record” functions on your computer to capture keystrokes. Redwood is wholly different in the market as we build our robots within the application and don’t rely on user system. The user still sees everything, but the robot is running using the application directly. Much more accurate, efficient, and effective. It is also audit-able.
In terms of manufacturing, we also have IoT capable processes that can provide real-time floor manufacture data from machine status, to inventory management, and automatic invocation of re-plans based on supply chain changes and order status.



Its all pretty cool really._

Back in the days when I ran large manufacturing plants at diverse locations, I received daily shift reports on what was done, what was consumed, and what relationship that had with what was still in the plans to be accomplished.  I processed the information every morning, in a few hours, from which I could then make decisions.  With RPA I could have made them instantaneously in real time as they happened.

I think what eshikakhanna0 is discussing is a software app.  Not it's integration into manufacturing alone but perhaps a broader view.


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## tommu56

We use a gateway's on our PLC systems to pass data to IT for real time information  to management. As for the machine control everything is done in side the PLC environment and   to put it simply we give the finessed data to server for IT to pull no data comes in through the server to the PLC's. Basically management asks for data from IT it figures out what they wanted and  gives us a request for data we put it in a register give them an address to get it.  One of the biggest learning curves for our IT group was they didn't need data accurate to the millisecond that most times 5 minuets was an acceptable time base. They causes some major plant network outages by demanding "fast data" and they were polling the gateway every couple millisecond's (getting the same numbers) and I'm talking about  hundreds  of of registers and the network couldn't handle all that data, that's why we (PLC heads) don't want IT on the machine network directly and use the gateways.


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