Wondering what Robotic Process Automation is? Check out this clip from my Robotic Process Automation: Executive Briefing course on Pluralsight!
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Processes, aim to save time, and effort, and bring consistency and efficiency to recurring tasks.
- Understanding Workflows: A workflow is a repeatable sequence of operations that produces a result. Automating workflows ensures tasks are done consistently and efficiently across the organization.
- Traditional Automation Tools: These tools use APIs to interact with different applications, making them highly reliable. They are ideal for modern applications designed with APIs in mind.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA uses software robots to emulate user actions in a graphical user interface, making it useful for applications without APIs.
- Combining Traditional Automation and RPA: Both tools can be integrated to handle complex processes, using traditional automation for API-based tasks and RPA for tasks requiring user interface interactions.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to this executive briefing on business process automation using workflows and robotic process automation. My name is Vlad Catrinescu, and I will be your instructor for this course. In this executive briefing, we will talk about business process automation, workflows, and robotic process automation, a term that has gained a lot of popularity in recent years.
Before we delve into the more technical details, let’s first discuss the fundamentals of business process automation. Every organization in the world has a set of processes that they perform on a recurring basis. Some of these processes can be very manual, like opening and closing a store every day, while others can be digital, such as requesting a holiday, approving purchase orders, or paying invoices. As enterprises grow, so do the number of processes and the people executing them. With the increasing number of processes, there is a growing desire to automate some of them. This is where the term business process automation, or simply BPA, comes in. BPA allows you to use technology to automate complex business processes. The goal of BPA is to save time and effort and to bring consistency and efficiency to tasks performed regularly.
As we dig deeper into how to automate business processes, let’s start by talking about workflows. When we hear the word “workflow,” we think of a repeatable sequence of operations that produces a result. It might be anything from content approval on a document, submitting expense reports, or producing a product. At the end of the day, you have a repeatable process that you follow to ensure the result is a success. If there is no common workflow in your organization to achieve a certain result, you might notice a drop in productivity or even a lack of consistency in your final products. In the technology world, we want to use technology to ensure each business process is done the same way and to make it as simple as possible for the end user.
Let’s start with a simple example: requesting a holiday. It might seem like a simple task; after all, the only thing an employee needs to do is ask their boss for time off. However, even a simple process like this has multiple implications. For example, how many days of vacation does the employee have left? What communication medium does the employee use to ask for the holiday? How does the approver see who has already requested a holiday at that time and if there will be enough people working? By using automation technology, you can automate certain workflows to ensure they are always done the same way across the company, making employees more productive and ensuring consistency across the organization. The holiday request example is just a small one, but imagine being able to automate expense approvals, purchase orders, and invoice processing.
Now that we know what a workflow is, let’s talk a bit deeper about how this automation can be achieved. The first type of tool I want to discuss is traditional automation tools. This might sound strange, as “traditional” might be associated with old technology, but that’s not the case here. When we talk about traditional automation tools, we’re referring to tools that use application programming interfaces, or APIs, to interact with different applications. An API is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software tools. It specifies the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats to use, and the conventions to follow. Traditional automation tools work best with modern applications, as most modern applications are designed with APIs in mind. These tools often wrap those APIs in connectors made for their specific application, making it easier for business users with no programming experience to create advanced workflows that interact with multiple applications. Given they interact with APIs directly, traditional automation tools are highly reliable. Most automation tools also allow you to build custom connectors, meaning that even if they do not have a built-in connector for an application, you can task your internal developers to build it. This can be very useful for your internal custom-made applications you might want to interact with.
The big limitation of traditional automation tools, however, is what happens if a certain software you want to automate doesn’t have an API for an action you want to perform or doesn’t have an API at all. This is where robotic process automation, or RPA, comes in. RPA is a form of business process automation technology that isn’t based on APIs but instead on metaphorical software robots. Instead of using programming interfaces, RPA systems develop an action list by watching the user perform tasks in the application’s graphical user interface. After you build your action list, the bots will simply perform those actions in the interface each time the workflow is launched. When you think about it, RPA tools have strong similarities to graphical user interface testing tools or screen scraping tools, but they are used with a different goal in mind. With RPA tools, you can open applications, click on different menus, type information, copy and paste, and gather information from the screen. It’s all done via bots that emulate your actions, clicking different places in an application and sending keyboard shortcuts to the application.
So, when would you use an RPA tool over a traditional automation tool? The answer is straightforward: if the application you want to automate has APIs, you should use traditional workflow tools. If the application does not have APIs or you do not have access to them, RPA still allows you to automate tasks. Another important aspect to understand is that business process automation vendors don’t only sell a traditional workflow automation tool or an RPA tool; they often have both, and they can be integrated with each other. This means that in your workflow, you can start by using a form that uses traditional automation, open something locally, and then use RPA to type in or perform an action. You can then use RPA to gather information from that legacy application, send it back to your workflow, and use traditional APIs to send a confirmation email at the end. As the processes you want to automate grow in complexity, you can make traditional workflows and RPA work together to help you automate.
Robotic process automation technology has existed for a while but has really grown in popularity over the last five years. It’s expected to be a $25 billion industry by 2027, according to a report published by Grand View Research in July 2020. Talking about terms that have gained popularity in recent years, let’s also discuss artificial intelligence in the context of business process automation.
