Business agility is unquestionably a differentiator; you want tasks, especially basic and repetitive ones, to be done faster, so that people have time to work on strategy. The way to do this is to rely on technology - and this is where automation comes in.
Automating is a way to optimize a team's efforts without having to increase staff. You start by understanding the teams' processes, separating those that are repetitive, made based on preestablished rules, and do not require strategic decisions - and then you "outsource" them to software.
However, there’s more than one type of process automation: regular (unnamed) and robotic (RPA). Let's understand these concepts better to assess which one you need.
What is Automation?
Automation is about making processes automatic. Most of the time, it's used to support people with repetitive processes - from opening a gate for a car to generating alerts for the finance team or even checking that a system is working.
When we apply automation to a task, we give that exact process to the machine or program. This way, the automation is able to do tasks by itself.
What is the difference between automation and robotic automation?
Robotic automation is more complex than regular process automation, as it involves some degree of intelligence in addition to mimicking a repetitive task.
With the support of artificial intelligence, besides having programmed technology acting alone to perform tasks, the robotic kind also learns and self-regulates.
Google does this with its searches: you type a term into the search and it returns a set of results. As you click on one of them and spend more or less time on certain pages, it learns and regulates the result for you. That is a robotic process.
Comparing process automation to robotic process automation
Based on the above explanations, we now know that both kinds of automation involve transferring a human task to a program, machine, or device, and also, in both cases, human intervention becomes unnecessary after the task is automated.
Even if you don't need to intervene for the task to happen, both in regular and robotic automation, it’s important to monitor and ensure that everything is going as it should.
The difference comes from the fact that regular, non-robotic automation will always repeat the same task as programmed without modifications.
On the other hand, robotic process automation is capable of analyzing work in real time and making preprogrammed decisions to modify its performance and deliver a better result.
How to choose between process automation and robotic process automation
To choose how to automate a process, you need to understand what you need. There are simpler and more easily accessible tools for regular process automation, such as Qntrl, which are ideal for business processes with repetitive day-to-day tasks.
The advantage is that you define the rules, you can implement automation quickly, and it's generally more affordable.
This can be applied to finance processes, such as accounts payable and receivable, marketing processes, such as the content creation flow, and HR flows, to standardize vacation or hiring requests.
On the other hand, if you need the platform to do more than run tasks and want even less human intervention, it's worth looking at robotic process automation. With RPA, you have software and algorithms to correct errors without human intervention, register new products, and even generate analyses.
It removes much of the human intervention but may require greater investment and more understanding of technology to be able to operate with real benefit.
Do you see the differences now? What do you think is the best model for your business?
