Robotic process and intelligent automation for finance (edX)

This course is designed for accountancy, finance and business professionals working in all organisations from small business, large corporates or financial services or who are just interested in learning more about these new and exciting technologies and how they can transform organisational processes and customer experiences of services and products. With a focus on practical skills throughout, this course provides the ability to apply skills as well as understand them.

This course is part of the FinTech for Finance and Business Leaders Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

- Understand how automation can assist in the efficiency of the finance function

- Identify how the use of automation can support the organisational strategy

- Correctly identify the opportunities for automation in their function

- Be able to develop a business case for investment in automation

- Appreciate the range of tools that can be used and how to select the right one for your business case

- How to plan the implementation of an automation solution to realise benefits and maximise efficiencies

Syllabus

1. What is Intelligent Automation

- The concept

- Why finance functions need to transform

- The nature of the opportunity

- Target operating model for finance

- Role of the finance function in decision making

- Data governance – one version of the truth

IA and process improvement

- Relation between IA and process optimisation

- How clean do your processes need to be?

The tools in overview

- Robotic Process Automation

- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

- Python

How it is delivered ?

- Overview of software

- End-user vs. formal IT project

- Agile project approaches

2. Process optimisation

Approach

Role of automation

Workflow management

Design thinking

Implication on headcount

3. Choosing the solution

Approach

Business issues facing finance

Correctly identify the problem / opportunity

Opportunity

- What type of processes are you looking to automate?

- Repetitive processes vs. judgement

Evaluating candidates

- Is RPA the right solution?

- Repetition and frequency

- Data manipulation

Types of RPA solution

- Do-it yourself – user level using publicly available / free tools, such as Python

- Off-the-shelf – package software

- Customised – vendor developed bespoke solutions

- Selecting the appropriate solution

4. Do-it-yourself

Python based solutions

- What is Python?

- Application of Python to finance problems?

- Machine Learning in context of finance