What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology designed to simplify the creation, deployment, and management of software bots that mimic human actions and interactions with digital systems and software.
The benefits of RPA.
Unlock the transformative power of RPA—a fast and effective way to streamline workflows and automate repetitive tasks.
Increase productivity
Speed up and streamline workflows with greater reliability and precision.
Save money
Boost efficiency across the organization, reducing costs and providing quick ROI.
Integrate seamlessly
Eliminate technology silos and achieve enterprise-wide efficiencies and collaboration.
Boost employee morale
Free up employees to focus on rewarding, fulfilling, and valuable work.
Improve adaptability
Scale with complete adherence to security and compliance requirements.
How does enterprise RPA work?
Robotic process automation is software that gets work done using the same digital skillset as people—and then some. Think of RPA as a digital workforce that can interact with any system or application to perform repetitive digital tasks—things like copy-pasting, scraping web data, making calculations, opening and moving files, parsing emails, logging into programs, and connecting to APIs. Despite its extensive capabilities, setting up automations is surprisingly simple and user-friendly, akin to recording and sharing a video on your smartphone.
While just as straightforward and intuitive to use, enterprise-level RPA is also designed for the security, systems integration, scale, and compliance requirements of large organizations. Robust and resilient, enterprise RPA is capable of orchestrating thousands of automations at the same time while ensuring high availability and performance across enterprise operations. Enterprise RPA is part of the end-to-end Intelligent Automation strategy necessary for organizations to automate effectively.
Rule-based and adaptive
Enterprise RPA not only follows pre-defined rules but also learns from data patterns to swiftly adapt to new information.
High-fidelity at high-volume
Enterprise RPA delivers consistent, compliant performance for repetitive yet business-critical operations involving thousands of automations.
Defined data input/output
While RPA on it’s own is limited to structured data, enterprise RPA seamlessly integrates with AI tools that harness unstructured data.
What to look for in an enterprise RPA solution.
Building or managing an enterprise-wide automation program? The reality is that RPA is not a stand-alone solution. RPA technology that’s designed for the scope and scale of complex, interactive business processes and connected global operations is part of an Intelligent Automation platform. For automations that work effectively alongside human teams, seamlessly and securely integrate with enterprise systems, and handle heavy workloads, look for RPA technology that’s part of an end-to-end AI-powered automation solution.
Scale
Planning for growth and change requires scalability for process volume as well as user base. Enterprise RPA can dynamically scale up to accommodate business growth and the workload demands associated with large organizations’ high volume of repetitive tasks without compromising performance. An extensible SaaS platform can also smoothly scale out and across departments and teams with easy-to-add licenses for everyone from citizen developers to digital assistants.
Low-code/No-code
Low-code and no-code RPA refer to the ability for non-technical users to easily create automations without coding knowledge. Not only does low-code/no-code development make it faster and easier to automate, for larger organizations with multiple departments and teams, it allows for a wider range of employees to contribute to automation efforts. This so-called citizen development is foundational to enterprise-wide Intelligent Automation and digital transformation.
Interoperability and integration
Ease of integration is crucial in an enterprise environment where countless systems and applications need to work together. Enterprise RPA offers seamless interoperability with both legacy systems and new applications. An effective enterprise RPA solution will also seamlessly integrate via native connectors with tools and technologies, such as AI models and APIs, enabling organizations to automate a wide range of tasks requiring communication with and data access from multiple sources.
Orchestration
Orchestration is another essential feature of enterprise RPA. It’s what allows for the management and coordination of multiple automations simultaneously. This is especially important for large organizations that may have hundreds of processes running concurrently.
Audit and governance
An enterprise RPA solution comes equipped with built-in audit trails and reporting features to provide a clear and traceable record of every automation action and interaction, ensuring transparency and compliance. For operational simplicity and improved monitoring, look for credential management that includes native secure credential storage and compatibility with privileged access management platforms like CyberArk, AWS, and Azure key vaults.
Governance capabilities play a crucial role in controlling automation efforts within an organization. An effective enterprise RPA platform offers features like permission controls and version control. This ensures that only authorized personnel have access to and can make modifications to automations, maintaining strict governance standards.
Security
Security is a top priority for any enterprise organization, and an effective RPA solution should have robust security measures in place to maintain consistent security posture across automations. This includes defense-in-depth secure cloud operations, identity and access management (IAM), data encryption, logging and monitoring, cloud infrastructure security, application security, incident response, and the ability to comply with industry-specific regulations. Look for security certifications such as ISO27001 and SOC 1 & 2 Type 2.
Cloud-native
Cloud compatibility is a crucial aspect for organizations looking to scale their automation efforts. A cloud-based enterprise RPA solution allows for increased flexibility, accessibility, and scalability. Cloud-native architecture minimizes costs across infrastructure, maintenance, security, and compliance. There’s no guessing what infrastructure you need, automatic sizing and ongoing capacity monitoring, continuous enhancements pushed automatically to all users. High availability/disaster recovery is included.
Data privacy and compliance
Compliance adherence is essential for organizations operating in highly regulated industries. An effective enterprise RPA platform should have the ability to comply with industry-specific regulations, ensuring that all automated tasks are in line with legal and ethical standards. Look for cloud-native RPA adhering to GDPR and data privacy principles, encryption of sensitive information, and essentials-only cloud storage. Certifications to trust: SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, and ISO 22301.
RPA use cases by industry.
Robotic process automation offers benefits for key stakeholders across industries.
Financial Services
By removing human error, RPA can strengthen security and compliance to mitigate financial risks.
Healthcare
Automate manual tasks to offer enhanced patient experience, robust security, and guaranteed compliance.
Manufacturing
Reduce costs and speed up time-to-market with improved productivity on the factory floor and back-office.
Life Sciences
Boost productivity while removing the risk of human error to accelerate pharmacovigilance and complaint handling.
The Evolution of RPA.
Robotic process automation has come a long way in a short time.
Automating repetitive tasks
Robotic Process Automation has become a must-have for modern enterprises. RPA as we know it was first used to revolutionize document processing. By fully automating repetitive, high-volume tasks like data entry, scraping, and extraction, RPA broke down a myriad of productivity barriers.
Democratizing automation
Low-code RPA software was also easy for employees to use, meaning it became a crucial tool in democratizing automation. It empowered everyone in the business to get involved, so that every department could make use of RPA benefits to drive their own digital transformation.
Introducing AI
Now, a new era of RPA plus artificial intelligence (AI) is here. Intelligent Automation combines RPA with cognitive technologies, such as machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, fuzzy logic—and, most recently, generative AI and AI agents.
Expanding use cases
The combination of AI technologies with RPA has broadened the range of automation opportunities. This development enables the full automation of complex business processes and diverse workflows, allowing organizations to implement adaptable and end-to-end enterprise-wide automation.
Get started on your RPA Journey.
RPA is an automation tool for everyone—here’s how to kickstart your automation journey, drive organization-wide transformation, and future-proof your automation strategy.
Readiness: Outline your digital transformation vision.
Right from the start, identify automation solutions that align with your business objectives and wider vision. Ask lots of questions—both internally and externally. Reach out to trusted partners, vendors, and other organizations already on their RPA journeys. Putting people at the center of your plans is crucial for success. Bring in HR early and involve a broad cross-section of stakeholders, change agents, and RPA champions.
Vendor: Evaluate and select your best-fit solution and support model.
The golden rule? Think long-term. That means choosing an RPA solution that’s apart of a more robust and comprehensive suite of products, like an Intelligent Automation platform. Find a vendor that can demonstrate experience and stability, and is invested in continuing to adapt and innovate. Importantly, automation will only be successful if employees are empowered to self-serve. That means you’ll need to choose a tool that’s technically powerful as well as accessible for business users, not just IT specialists.
Engagement: Establish a center for RPA standards and oversight.
Expanding RPA for end-to-end business process automation relies on widespread RPA adoption. Start strong by creating an organization-wide center of excellence (CoE). The CoE should focus on effectiveness and governance, will be in charge of creating standards, and must propagate best practices, tools, and templates. It’s a hub of RPA expertise, established to help the entire organization get up and running with their own automations.
Expansion: Step beyond RPA into Intelligent Automation.
Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. RPA sets the foundation for a long-term value-adding approach to innovation. It’s important to build this into your plans for RPA at all stages. Automation Anywhere helps businesses get started with RPA with Intelligent Automation in mind. This way you can move beyond automating steps in workflows and onto the next stage of transformation effortlessly.
The Automation Success Platform.
Select an intelligent automation solution to support the many facets of your transformation journey including your workforce, integration with existing systems, security and scale.
