Introduction to Robotic Process Automation

Quiz

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software-based automation technology used for automating business processes and operations in most modern organizations.

RPA is basically a technology that can automate rule-based, repetitive tasks that have lower value in the organization and consume very high employee efforts. Hence, modern business organizations use RPA as a tool to automate lower value tasks and free up employees to focus on higher value, strategic tasks.

Introduction to Robotic Process Automation

RPA provides software robots to emulate human actions in business processes. In this chapter, we will get an overview of fundamentals of robotic process automation such as basic definition, main components, types of RPA bots, etc. So, let's start with the basic introduction to RPA.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an automation technology that provides software robots to automate rule-based, repetitive tasks within a business organization. RPA combines user interface and application programming interface interactions to execute tasks and emulate human actions. RPA uses a predefined set of instructions to execute various operations autonomously.

Robotic process automation is a valuable tool to automate a large volume of business process that otherwise require a huge number human-employee. RPA helps business organizations to free up their human resources to focus on more complex, strategic, and high-value processes. RPA also makes processes consistent and thus results in higher efficiency and ROI.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Components

Robotic Process Automation consists of several key components that operate together to perform tasks autonomously. Some of the main components of RPA are explained here −

RPA Development Tools

These components are also termed as RPA bot designer or studio. RPA development tools are designed to provide functionalities and interfaces for designing and developing RPA software bots, instructions, and automation workflows. These components of RPA are mainly used by RPA developers and process experts.

These components provide the following key functionalities −

Provides a user friendly, drag-and-drop interface for creating automation workflows.
Provides pre-designed and reusable templates to create automation for common processes.
Provides capabilities to connect the RPA bots with external applications, databases, and application programming interfaces.
Provides testing and troubleshooting functionalities to debug the automation workflows during design process.

Some common examples of RPA development tools include −

UiPath Studio
Blue Prism
Automation Anywhere
Microsoft Power Automate
Pega, etc.

Bot Runtime Environment

These RPA components provide an environment where software bots of RPA can operate. Hence, these act as the operational layer for running the automation workflows.

Bot runtime environment is also referred to as RPA's execution engine, and provides the following functionalities −

Provides attended execution functionality, where RPA bots run alongside the human workers in real-time.
Provides unattended execution of tasks, where RPA bots run as autonomous virtual worker without any human intervention.
Provides cross-platform support, so the RPA bots can run on different platforms like desktop, web, or enterprise systems.

Some popular examples of RPA bot runtime environments are as follows −

UiPath Orchestrator
Blue Prism Control Room
Pega Robotics Studio
Automation Anywhere Enterprise, etc.

RPA Control Center

This component of RPA provides functionalities for managing RPA bots. It helps business organizations to deploy, configure, and monitor the operations of RPA bots.

The key functional capabilities that RPA control center provide are as follows −

It helps managing the deployment of RPA bots to different environments.
It allows for configuring the RPA bots to execute tasks and processes.
It provides real-time monitoring capabilities and performance analysis of RPA bots.
It sets access constraints to RPA bots operations depending on role of the user.

Some common examples RPA control centers include −

UiPath Orchestrator
Blue Prism Control Room
Automation Anywhere Control Room, etc.

RPA Bot Libraries

These are RPA components which responsible for storing reusable automation resources like components, scripts, or workflows. These tools help reducing development time of RPA bots by providing reusable automation blocks.

Integration Layer

It is the component of RPA that provides essential functionalities for RPA bots interactions with different systems and applications. The RPA integration layer allows software bots to establish the communication with databases, enterprise applications, web services, and application programming interfaces.

Types of RPA Bots

RPA bots are nothing but software programs/robots that can emulate human actions. Depending on the level of automation and interaction with human users, the RPA bots can be classified into the following three main types −

Attended RPA Bots
Unattended RPA Bots
Hybrid RPA Bots

Let's have detailed discussion on each type of RPA bots.

Attended RPA Bots

These RPA bots are designed to operate alongside human workers in a shared work environment. Hence, attended RPA bots assist human workers to perform their tasks in real time.

The following are some key features of attended RPA bots −

They need human commands to perform tasks.
They run in synchronization with human user’s actions.
They are suitable to perform tasks in which human intelligent is needed for decision-making.

Some common examples of applications of attended RPA bots include −

In customer support services, handling and resolving customer’s queries with virtual assistant.
In healthcare, bots used to retrieve patient’s records for consultation.
In sales departments, bots used for generating quotes and proposals.

Unattended Bots

These RPA bots are capable to autonomously run without any human intervention. For this purpose, they use pre-defined sets of instructions and schedules.

The following some key characteristics of unattended bots that differentiate them from attended RPA bots −

They are fully automated and do not require any human involvement to operate.
They can run on virtual machines like servers or cloud platforms.
They are capable in handling large volumes of repetitive tasks.

Some common examples of unattached RPA bots use cases include −

Extracting data from documents
Updating employee databases and processing payrolls
Verifying invoices and processing vendor payments, etc.

Hybrid RPA Bots

These RPA bots are designed to combine the features of attended and unattended bots. Hence, these are capable in providing collaboration between human workers and software bots as well as handling some portion of processes autonomously.

Some of the key features of hybrid RPA bots are highlighted below −

They provide a dynamic transition between attended and unattended functionalities.
They provide capabilities to automate end-to-end processes.
They are easily scalable and adaptable to handle complex processes.

Common example use-cases of hybrid RPA bots include −

In customer onboarding process, verifying documents as unattended bot and performing a personal interaction as attended bot.
In customer support, hybrid bots are used to generate complaint tickets autonomously and involve expert technician to handle exceptions.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we provided an overview of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), its key components and different types of RPA bots. Let's move to next chapter in the tutorial and learn about some Popular RPA Tools.

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