RPA and DPA: Why You Need Both for Digital Transformation

Blog: Bizagi Blog

Within the next two years, Gartner
predicts that 72% of organizations will be working with Robotic Process Automation
(RPA). Additionally, Digital Process Automation (DPA) has been recognized as a
major component for digital transformation, with the DPA market now worth $6.76
billion, and predicted to rise to $12.61 billion by 2023, according to Think
Automation.

Combining RPA and DPA is a vital combination for
organizations who are looking to digitally transform and remain competitive. While
both technologies have their own strengths, combining RPA and DPA can help to
deliver true end-to-end automation and truly transform your business. Here’s why
you need both RPA and DPA.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

While there are multiple ways to describe Robotic Process Automation (RPA), EY sums it up nicely as “the use of software that mimics human behavior to carry out repetitive, high volume administration tasks.” There are not any physical robots involved, the robots are in fact software. It is essentially automation that carries out tasks usually completed by humans. This then frees up employees’ time so they can instead do higher value work.

What is Digital Process Automation?

Digital Process Automation (DPA) is fast emerging as an important evolution of the traditional category of Business Process Management, also known as BPM. DPA provides the agility and insight needed to enable a holistic approach to automating business processes. It enables you to manage the flow of data across your enterprise and makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and make agile changes.

How can RPA help with digital transformation?

90% of employees are currently burdened with boring and repetitive
tasks that could easily be automated, according to Think
Automation. RPA can help to free up employee time by carrying out manual,
administrative tasks so that staff can focus on value-add tasks instead. This
also helps to eliminate human error because bots are programmed to follow
routine tasks with extreme accuracy, so there is no risk of typos or incorrect
information entries.

This all helps to contribute to reduced costs. UiPath
reports that RPA projects can reduce costs by up to 80% with most companies
seeing a positive ROI in less than a year

Great. So, what about DPA?

Where RPA carries out tasks usually carried out by
employees, DPA is more about the automation of tasks end-to-end to help improve
the customer journey. Having a DPA platform in place establishes end-to-end automation
of processes across your organization.

It unites the business and IT departments in the business for better collaboration. The platform also acts as an orchestrator that brings together siloed data to give a better view of all customer information. This, in turn, helps to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Why do I need both RPA and DPA?

Combining RPA with DPA can help to deliver a more all-inclusive
automation strategy to your organization than if you were to use one of the
technologies in isolation. For example, Bizagi can create queues of tasks and then RPA bots can pull down work to complete instead of humans. So, DPA orchestrates processes end-to-end, and RPA completes tasks within these processes.

According to Deloitte, the top challenge when it comes to RPA implementation is process standardization. This is due to the large amounts of unstructured data that organizations are trying to automation. DPA can bring logic to this data and orchestrate the information to get it ready. DPA ensures that a solid process is designed and optimized before it is automated. This way you avoid reinforcing bad processes and create transparency across the organization.

A platform like Bizagi’s also acts as a safety net for potential disruptions to RPA. Bots are particularly sensitive to changes to applications, which can create performance issues. Bizagi can be used to route around failed bots and move tasks to a queue for a human worker.

RPA is also well-suited to going into core systems and pulling data, populating forms, ordering parts, etc. But 80% of apps don’t have APIs. So, RPA provides another level of integration capability for a DPA platform, which relies on using APIs and connectors. The two technologies complement each other very well.

You can add Artificial Intelligence to your automation strategy to achieve Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). AI contributes great intelligence and decision making to the mix. This brings another level of thinking to the automation. AI can analyze data in a way that a human could not, recognizing patterns in data and learning from past decisions to make increasingly intelligent choices.

While these technologies are all powerful in their own
right, uniting AI with DPA and RPA, you can ensure that you are taking a
strategic approach and automating not only tasks, but entire processes,
enterprise-wide.

What are the benefits of combining RPA and DPA?

Deploying both RPA and DPA can help to:

Orchestrate humans and robots: Rather than deploying RPA
in silos to complete individual tasks, combining RPA and DPA can help co-ordinate
work between robots, people and systems, delivering enterprise-wide solutions.

Support compliance: Automation gives you peace of mind that tasks are being completed in line with governance and best practice. Plus, all your processes will be documented, leaving an audit trail that is readily available.

Provide visibility of the customer journey: When
individual automation technologies are deployed, it can be hard to see the
enterprise-wide result. Using RPA and DPA together, you can see the entire
process, allowing you to identify bottlenecks, or points at which the customer
journey could be smoother.

Enable agile and scalable development: Combining RPA and DPA makes it easy to make agile changes to processes. This helps organizations to continually improve their business processes and deploy more bots when they want to scale up automation.

Save costs: RPA and DPA help employees to be more efficient by reducing the time it takes to complete tasks and ensuring successful execution. Implementing automation in the office generates 30% to as much as 200% ROI in the first year, mainly in labor savings, reports Think Automation.

Download the free eBook, ‘Why Bizagi and RPA Are Better Together’ for actionable insight on why Bizagi and RPA complement each other, why end-to-end automation is the real goal and your Bizagi RPA action plan. Learn how to use Bizagi’s DPA platform to fully realize your investment in RPA and achieve end-to-end automation of your business processes, contributing to your enterprise-wide digital transformation.

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