Process automation is not a new thing in the IT world and Robotic Process Automation(RPA) is a new approach to automate business processes.
Wikipedia defines RPA as
“ A software ‘robot’ is a software application that replicates the actions of a human being interacting with the user interface of a computer system. The software robot operates on the user interface (UI) in the same way that a human would. ”
In spirit both traditional and RPA automation both strive to bring software systems together to automate business processes but there are 5 areas RPA is different and has a different approach
Technology
Traditional automation is primarily based on programming and relies on APIs and other integration methods to integrate different systems. RPA on the other hand mimics the actions of a user at the User Interface level.
In traditional automation the developer needs to have a good understanding of the target system wheres in RPA since the robot is mimicking the user actions and as long as the robot can exactly follow the steps we don’t need to worry about the complexity of the underlying application.
Vendor / Software Restrictions
There can be multiple reasons where traditional automation might not be an option
- No source code with the software and users have limited options to customize the application.
- Legacy products are not designed and built for integration and don’t have robust APIs.
- Skilled developers might not be available to work on legacy systems
Automating these type of systems will need deep knowledge of the software and some customers might be restricted to make any changes and traditional automation might not be an option.
Since RPA works on the UI layer and these restrictions typically might not apply and RPA can be an ideal option.
Time to Market
RPA automation does not need complex programming and testing efforts, RPA focuses on easy to do “record and play” type of automation and has a faster turnaround time than traditional automation.
Audience
RPA automation is geared towards techno functional SMEs who can teach the robots what to do wheres traditional automation projects need software developers and requires significant IT involvement
Personalized
One of the key benefit of an RPA automation can be that it can be personalized for a particular user.
For e.g. the bot can read an email, extract information , do something and reply back to the email.
The automation can span across personal applications (calendar, email ..etc) and enterprise applications (ERP, CRM..etc)
“RPA is beginning to have major impact on businesses and in the next few years RPA is going to automate majority of the repetitive routine tasks and let the workers focus on higher value work”
