What is RPA Used For?
Every business has repetitive, manual processes that eat up precious time that could be better spent on more strategic work. From data entry to user provisioning to accounts payable processes, robotic process automation (RPA) can help. RPA hands these and many other processes over to helpful software bots that will streamline your workload to improve efficiency, accuracy, and productivity.
Types of Automation for RPA
There are two main approaches to RPA: attended automation and unattended automation. Both types of automation are key when it comes to transforming workflows and picking processes to automate, and companies can use one type or a mix, depending on their needs. Different bots handle different activities so the type of automation you choose should correspond with the processes you are automating.
Attended Automation: Bots work alongside human employees to make everyday tasks easier. There is some human intervention needed, as these tasks go into action when a user commands it to run. Attended automation is used to streamline processes like screen scraping or GUI automation, among others.
Unattended Automation: Bots work behind the scenes and are triggered by an action—like a file being added to a folder—to manage high volumes of data and information. Unattended automation is used to streamline processes like file transfers or database processing.
Capabilities of RPA
The capabilities of RPA are endless. But there are certain features to look for in an RPA tool that maximize its benefits by helping you get started faster, scale easier, and work more efficiently. Here are some of the most important capabilities of RPA software to look for:
No-Code Automation and Beyond
RPA is all about making life easier. Instead of spending your time manually writing scripts to get your automation going, an RPA solution should have no-code automation functionality. No-code doesn’t mean low-grade, an RPA tool can still have seamless automation development and robust capability to handle complex processes. That’s why it’s best to look for a tool that makes it easy for both developers and citizen users to get up and running with features like drag-and-drop task building, pre-built automation actions, and even bot stores.
Application Integration
Organizations rely on many different business applications to keep things running smoothly. But when these apps can’t interact with each other, it slows things down. An RPA solution can integrate your critical business applications—whether modern or legacy—and connect systems that normally wouldn’t talk to each other. Plus, an RPA tool with native API connectivity makes connecting your apps even easier.
Dashboard Views
Businesses with true enterprise automation need a way to easily monitor and manage their workflows. A solution with dashboard views gives you an overview of system activity, displays system error messages, and places important problems front and center for you to manage. Get everything you need to keep things running, right at your fingertips.
Security and Auditing
When it comes to your most critical business processes, you can’t take any chances. That’s why a tool with the ability to easily maintain security and compliance of your automated operations is important. This includes user access controls, permission settings, password vaults, custom logs, change history, and notifications so you always know what’s happening with your workflows.
Advanced Automation Technologies
The next wave of automation is coming with capabilities like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of these automation capabilities is to complete more sophisticated and complex work, augmenting human capabilities and enhancing decision making through your business. Combined together, RPA bots handle the rule-based tasks like data entry and extraction and feeds it to ML or AI bots that use algorithms to make human-like decisions and execute on them.
What Can RPA Do for Your Business?
See our RPA capabilities in action with a live demo of Automate, the powerful RPA solution from Fortra. Our team of experts will discuss your organization’s current challenges and requirements and show you what RPA can do for your business.