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In the OP's specific instance when would you reach out for a traditional ETL tool vs an RPA solution?


RPA is for data sources and destinations that are meant for human consumption and entry. So you’d use RPA to take an image of a table and enter every row into a web form.


How much does the involvement of a bank of fax machines complicate things?


A little perhaps, but not much. One can replace a bank of physical fax machines with modems.

It would be an interesting job for sure. Why wasn't it done before? I can imagine only two reasons. One, there isn't that much data to move and it makes no sense to build software for what few people spend 30min per day on. Two, the data in the legacy system is images and people are not just moving it between systems, but they also do categorisation, verification etc. In which case an AI model may be useful, but almost always hard coded rules will be faster.




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