Sysprove presents Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and its auditing concepts

An event under the title “Auditing Emerging Technologies” was held by ISACA Bahrain Chapter on 18^th January 2023 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Bahrain. The event was a collaboration between the ISACA Bahrain Chapter and The Institute of Charted Accountants to shed light on emerging concepts of RPA and Cybersecurity.

The event covered two key presentations, “Practical insights for Auditors on Robotic Process Automation (RPA)” presented by Sysprove’s CEO, Ravi Jayasundera, and “Best Practices for Cybersecurity Audit” by Abubakar Arshad, CTO at BEYON Cyber Bahrain.

Ravi introduced the concept of RPA to the crowd with enticing facts and a humorous but truthful video about how repeated work decreases human productivity hence why organisations should use RPA for repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks. To further understand the functionality of RPA and how it is used in the real world, Ravi walked the audience into a complete use case of using RPA to 1) Invoice Processing for Accounts Payable and 2) Client Account Onboarding. Each use case showcased how the RoBOT extracted, loaded, and updated the task requirements using multiple applications including ERPs.

As there isn’t always a clear direction on how to audit new and emerging concepts and it takes time for global organisations to define a standard, auditors find it challenging to follow a uniform and standard approach for auditing certain areas such as RPA. In his presentation, Ravi concluded with tips and tricks that auditors can use to audit RPA. He stressed that auditing RPA can be performed from two different dimensions, auditing the RPA project(s), and auditing ongoing RPA operations.

The audience was a mixture of auditors, IT experts, and business professionals. The presentations ended with an interactive Q & A session with the audience posing questions related to RPA and cybersecurity and how they can take the knowledge they gained further into practical practice.