In today’s world you need to work with lots of different applications.Also you would be doing the same repetitive tasks using these applications everyday.In a organisation there are many business processes.These business process often includes same repetitive tasks.These can be automated using Robotic Process Automation.
Business Process Automation
Business process automation also called digital transformation is the automation of business processes. RPA is a type of business process automation.
Robotic Process Automation
RPA stands for Robotic process automation.It is a new technology which is used for automation of business processes. RPA can be thought of as Software Robots (or agents) which uses Artificial intelligence for performing tasks usually performed by humans.One common use of RPA is screen scrapping.Other examples include filling information and extracting information from a document.
Software robot is AI (artificial intelligence) system which automates manual business processes.One good example of the application of Robotic Process Automation is manually verifying hundreds of records manually which would take lot of time for a human employee.
RPA removes the need to do repetitive jobs by humans
Workflow automation is a old concept and involves a developer who develop tasks for automating actions using development tools and languages.So automation tasks are developed by developer and it involves writing APIs,interacting with other systems.Big constraint in automating applications using this traditional approach is the custom development which involves developers having knowledge of the application and the availability of the APIs for interacting with other applications.
A common example of automation using traditional automation approach is autation testing tools such as selenium.
RPA features
RPA on the other hand has the following features:
- It does not need the access of the code to perform automation.
- It only involves interaction with GUI.This is a very big advantage since source code of legacy system might be difficult to modify for automation.
- It does not need developers for the automation of the tasks.This is a beneficial for the organisations since this means faster time to market.
- RPA has applications in different areas such as finance,healthcare and customer service.