While business automation through RPA is gaining popularity among more and more enterprises, RPA is not a panacea for all businesses. In some cases, RPA is not the only solution.
RPA has played a positive role in improving efficiency and reducing cost, but the current RPA products are still not perfect. Before deploying RPA, IT departments should not only consider which scenarios RPA should be used for, but also discuss which scenarios RPA should not be used for.
RPA’s purpose: To automate simple tasks
Over the years, companies have been optimizing their business processes. Most of the things that have not been optimized are complex, fragmented businesses, not simply repetitive work. This will affect the expansion of RPA application scale.
Ultimately, it is the complexity of processes and applications, not the RPA itself, that is holding back RPA scale. Companies that have changed RPA suppliers should know this well.
Instead of using RPA to automate all businesses, enterprises should use RPA automation to optimize simple tasks in complex processes.
After all, it is more efficient to automate 50% of a business with 1,000 employees than to automate 100% of a business with 20 employees.
Moreover, RPA is not automation’s trump card, but one of the ways to drive digital transformation. Digital transformation is about changing the business, and RPA is about optimizing part of the business.
Even if RPA automates inappropriate processes in older legacy applications, it does not change the fact that the process itself is inappropriate.
Deploying the RPA is not the end of the story
RPA is not just a matter of setting it right. RPA is not extensible for apis. Therefore, IT departments can not be a one-size-fits-all.
The latest Pegasystems survey of 509 decision makers around the world found that 87% of respondents had experienced bot failures at some point; Forty-one percent of respondents said they spent more time and resources on ongoing bot management than expected.
Rpa-based automation can use apis to redesign new digital interfaces. However, this RPA connection will be temporary.
There are better techniques for intelligent automation than RPA. Such as:
- To eliminate cumbersome spreadsheets, low-code designs that support centralized control rules can be used;
- Centralized E-mail management with natural language processing capabilities that read and respond to E-mail instead of RPA in Outlook;
- Choreography and low code composition facilitate the replacement of outdated processes and the abolition of legacy applications that perform inappropriate processes.
RPA should not be used to automate complex processes
The core of RPA is screen automation through the user interface (UI). In other words, the RPA reads the information from the screen, processes the data, and sends it back to the screen. Because all Rpas are limited by the operating system and the capabilities of the many complex compiled applications running on it. Therefore, RPA does not require much intelligence.
While some RPAS have AI-OCR recognition capabilities built into them, in this case application automation is slower and more erratic than object-based automation in some RPA products.
- Complex processes embedded with complex applications and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are not suitable for RPA. Such processes are unstable, costly to support, and do not run frequently.
In addition, long-term enterprise Application Integration (EAI) projects should not use RPA because it is not architecturally appropriate.
Even simple UI changes in the RPA chain can seriously impact the EAI. This is unfortunate for enterprise architects who aim for powerful, extensible apis connected with proven security technologies.
However, such apis are not necessarily useful for short-term optimizations or digital conversions. In this case, there is no question of treating the RPA as a stopgap.
It will be interesting to see how RPA develops going forward. The failure to roll out RPA will at least draw attention to inappropriate processes. Eventually, people may start to change these undesirable processes.
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