Robotics Process Automation (RPA)
Robotics Process Automation is a:
form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots or on artificial intelligence /digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics.- Wikipedia
An RPA Strategy aims to answer some of the following questions:
How Software Robots are different from Human Users?
Software robots are the 'digital workers' behind RPA. Following figure shows key differences between human end user and software robots:
How RPA is different from Business Process Automation?
Process automation is not new and has been around for many decades. The traditional Business Process Automation is a broad, technology-enabled approach to integrate applications and automate end-to-end processes. Business Process Automation initiatives are often strategic and long term initiatives involving considerable business and technical resources.
RPA provides a considerably different approach for process automation. It first aims to identify areas where significant human effort is still required despite business process automation and then replace human effort by software robots which mimic human behavior. A good example is back office departments where customer requests are received and fulfilled by human actors, working on one or more business applications.
Business Process Automation
Robotics Process Automation
Holistic Approach: a broad end to end approach for process automation using variety of technologies
Tactical Approach: seeks to target high frequency and low complexity tasks which robots can perform at a high speed and with minimum errors
High Effort: usually high deployment effort with considerable time and budget requirements
Low Effort: short duration and low effort to train a robot a suitable process step or task
Long term outcome: usually the outcomes realized in longer term
Immediate return: deployments ease the pain points almost immediately by reducing human effort or error rates
Last updated
Was this helpful?