Which one is right for your business?

Regardless of their technological approach, companies are now striving to improve the customer experience and retention rates. Achieving this goal can be aided by automating robotic processes to eliminate tedious tasks, freeing up company employees to focus on higher value work. The main difference between robotic process automation (RPA) and robotic office automation (RDA) can be better explained based on the scope of each process.

In this article, we will explore the main differences between office automation and robotic process automation.

Robotic office automation vs. robotic process automation

Desktop robotic automation (RDA) is great for organizations that are just starting to automate their business processes. Desktop automation is reduced to a single user. It assists people with tedious tasks during their daily activities. For example, it can extract data, automate Excel processes, transfer files or generate reports.

It can also be used to automate desktop applications: regularly checking a website for updates or pulling reports and emailing them to the right recipient. In the event of an unknown situation, the software can return control to its human partner. We are talking about automation tools like WinTask, UiPath, HelpSystems and others.

Here are a few more examples of how humans and software bots can work together when crafting a selling proposition:

• The software bot will pull data from different sources, such as CRM systems, and assemble it for approval.
• Employees can write a proposal while using the bot to automate other tasks, improving overall productivity.

RDA is best suited for workflows that cannot be fully automated but can benefit from the automation of particular processes. On the other hand, RPA is excellent for workflows that do not require human supervision or where such supervision is not possible.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be installed on a server, a cloud instance or a virtual machine and works with all the applications of the company. People with different permissions can work together in the same process. For example, processing invoices seems to be a great solution for RPA.

However, each invoice is processed with many steps. It can retrieve an attachment from an email, classify the attachment as an invoice, and route the invoice for approval – RPA can handle all of that. In another example, RPA bots can run overnight to update data and migrate it while everyone is asleep. RPA can operate almost independently.

If we look at Google Trends, it’s pretty clear that RPA is used more than RDA. However, it always depends on the needs of each organization as to which solution is best for them. Whether desktop automation (RDA) or robotic process automation (RPA) is the right choice will depend on each use case, which is unique.

Using RDA can be a first step in adopting automation. Employees will be able to see the benefits of bots and ensure that bots can handle …