Businesses considering digital transformation have likely encountered Robotic Process Automation (RPA) if not heard of the term in a few contexts. RPA integrates automation capabilities that allow businesses to realize greater levels of efficiency and process optimization. With cognitive capture, process orchestration, and analytics, businesses can gain a foundation of intelligent automation. But how can a company tell between the hype for RPA and the technology’s true capabilities that can give it a competitive edge? Below we dive into some of the core capabilities of RPA as defined by Gartner and why they are so important for businesses.
Automation Development
This capability focuses on the way RPA users develop automations, and it considers the overall development environment. It includes the look and feel of the user interface, the graphical process modeling features, screen recorders, and process mining or task discovery. Automation development features include support for debugging automations and mechanisms for data manipulation, such as automatically creating variables from column header information in an Excel spreadsheet. Developers can save time with this capability.
Integration Features
This aspect of RPA covers a wide range of features, including screen scraping, metadata interaction, and robust API management. RPA has both “out-of-the-box” integration with inbound features, including surface-level machine vision, user interface metadata, and introspection methods, but it also includes outbound integration, which enables the external reuse of automations and components. These integration features can provide flexibility and easily merge with third-party applications.
Control Panel and Dashboard
This capability is all about how the environment is monitored and controlled. As a core capability, the control panel/dashboard functionality includes work allocation, monitoring of work throughput, and central auditing. RPA tools use real-time analytics to present visuals through the dashboard so businesses can assess resource usage, process completion time, and transaction success rates. Analytics also simplify the performance review process and spotlight areas of improvement when you need to audit an automation.
Identifying Change Impacts
Your RPA should be able to predict which automations will be affected by planned changes in the ecosystem. This capability is useful because it helps businesses avoid not knowing which parts of their organization will stop working when something changes, such as an upgraded application or the introduction of a new system of record.
Resilience, Error Recovery, and Security
You want your RPA to be prepared for unplanned events, and this capability entails business continuity, redundancy, and the overall integrity of the environment. RPAs should include mechanisms for automated disaster recovery. Additionally, security is a core capability that protects your environment with features that include credential storing and reuse, data security, and access control.
Integration with Business Rules/Process Automation
This capability means the RPA will support wider Business Process Automation (BPM) and/or business rules. Beyond just task-level data movement, the RPA should have integration with a BPM suite. RPA complements the BPM by allowing a business to perform tasks within a given workflow in record time. The integration of RPA with BPM brings in both types of process optimization.
If these capabilities sound like elements you’d like to explore for your business, contact us at All Star Software Solutions today. We can connect you with the RPA tools your business needs to achieve greater efficiency and productivity.
