Nowadays, companies strive to improve customer experience and retention, regardless of their technological approach. The main difference between robotics process automation (RPA) and robotic desktop automation (RDA) can be explained best based on their scopes.
RDA versus RPA
In this blog post, we will explore the key differences between desktop automation versus robotic process automation.
Desktop robotic automation (RDA) is excellent for organizations that are just starting out automating their business processes. Desktop automation is scaled down to a single user. It assists people with tedious tasks during their daily activities.
For example, it can scrape data, automate Excel processes, transfer files or generate reports. You can also automate desktop applications to check a website for updates regularly or pull reports and send them via email to the correct recipient.
In case there’s an unfamiliar situation, the software can return control to its human partner. We’re talking about desktop automation tools such as WinTask, UiPath, HelpSystems, and others.
Let’s see a few more examples of how humans and bots can work together when developing a sales proposal:
- The software bot will pull data from different sources, such as CRM systems, and assemble them for approval.
- Employees can write a proposal while using the bot to automate other tasks, enhancing general productivity.
RDA suits best for workflows that can’t be completely automated but can benefit from automating particular processes. On the other hand, RPA is excellent for workflows requiring no human supervision or where it is not possible.
Robotic process automation (RPA) can be installed on a server, cloud instance, or virtual machine and works with the entire company’s applications. People with different permissions can work together in the same process.
For example, processing invoices seems like an excellent fit for RPA. However, each invoice is processed with numerous steps. It might retrieve an attachment from an email, categorize the attachment as an invoice, route the invoice for approval.
All of these RPA can handle. Or another example, where RPA bots can run overnight to update data and migrate at a time when everyone’s asleep. RPA can function almost independently.
If one looks up Google Trends, it is pretty clear that RPA is more prevalent among users than RDA. However, it always comes down to your needs as to which solution works best for you.
Whether desktop automation (RDA) or robotic process automation (RPA) is the right choice will depend on your situation, which is unique and can’t be foreseen. Using RDA can be great as a first step in adopting automating throughout your company. Your employees will be able to see the benefits of bots and make sure the bots can handle the tasks you assign to them.
RDA & RPA: the key features
Let’s go through the RDA key features first.
- Customer experience enhancement. RDA helps employees to provide exceptional customer experience, as bots complete tasks fast with no errors.
- Business compliance. RDA tools are 100% compliant with business rules.
- Handles multiple records. RDA tools can go through various documents quickly to deliver outstanding results.
- Visual workflows. Most RDA’s have workflow design tools that help users to understand the process in general.
- Drag-n’-drop. Another key feature is the drag-n’-drop solution that makes it easy to build workflows.
- Wizards. Wizards guide users through specific workflow steps and recording users’ actions, extraction of texts, and web service data exchanges, which users commonly face.
Moving on to RPA key features, let’s start with the crucial ones.
- No-code solution. RPA tools allow people to automate business workflows simply by forming flowcharts. No knowledge of programming is needed.
- Security. RPA has introduced role-based permissions. Thus it’s safe for all parties to operate within a significant process.
- Dynamic adjustments. RPA adjusts itself dynamically in a running process.
- Maximum resource utilization. Humans often take tasks that are not interesting to them, so they get bored to death. RPA is assigned the functions of humans, that they are capable of ending in a suitable time.
- Cost reduction. RPA eliminates the scope of human hiring that may burden businesses with extra costs.
If you take a closer look at companies’ expectations, all of them need one thing: improve the effectiveness of the most commonly known business processes with a fast ROI. Unlikely that a company needs to automate all of the business processes or even 80%.
Most of them need to automate more or less 40% of the time-consuming day-to-day operations, and RDA works best for that matter.
Needless to say, implementing RDA will cost you less sometimes and can be done faster than trying to implement RPA with dozens of features you might not even need. Eventually, any company has a pragmatic results-driven approach, guided by the needs expressed by its business.
It focuses on general efficiency, regardless of the technology mix and the human or artificial intelligence involved. Sometimes it is enough to automate 60% of a process and leave the remaining 40% to a human to obtain ROI within a few months.
Summing up, we consider RDA a separate stand-alone piece of software that has proved itself a reliable assistant in removing routine tasks and making room for people to focus on the more essential things.
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