Start applying RPA in your company with Power Automate
In previous articles, we have discussed how tools like Power Automate help you connect processes and shorten time. In companies, employees carry out simple, repetitive tasks from the moment they start their day. If you go through all the jobs in your daily schedule, we are sure that you will find routines that you would rather not have to do.
Nowadays, that jobs, with the tools at our disposal, can be carried out with automated processes.
What is RPA?
Robotic process automation (acronym RPA) allows you to automate business processes, optimizing repetitive tasks and paperless processes. It frees up employees to focus on higher-level tasks that add value to the business. That improves productivity, eliminates redundancies, and scales worker safety and attention span.
RPA tools, can be easily configured to communicate with other systems, generate responses, and manipulate data. Robotic process automation mimics the user in their interactions on the screen and between systems to free us from these repetitive tasks and that everything remains relatively “familiar”.
What are the advantages of using RPA? Which examples are most common?
The most common advantages applicable to all types of users are:
- Faster production at lower cost.
- Reduce human error. Repetitive and low-value tasks can lead to mistakes due to worker inattention or fatigue.
- More time for innovation and strategy, employees can be dedicated to tasks that really add value.
As quick examples of automatable tasks, we could indicate jobs as simple as:
- Copy and paste between apps
- Process information between legacy and modern systems
- Generate reports and send emails
- Process purchase orders and invoices in email
- Track inventory and quantity in real time
- Manage requests and tickets
Can my company benefit from RPA?
The quickest answer, in most cases, is YES. Companies from all sectors (health, finance, automotive, energy, retail,…) can benefit from eliminating processes, saving time and avoiding unnecessary costs.
All those organizations that require daily or repetitive administrative tasks, or that offer IT administration and technical support, or any company that depends on voice recognition or automated and online assistants can take advantage of RPAs, since all the examples described usually improve, to a certain extent, when a bot attends to some part of the process.
Finding a good RPA solution for your company is a fundamental decision. To know what to automate we can help you, once we know what your work is like and thus decide where we should start. The solution must be easy to use, scalable, fast and reliable.
Differences between attended RPA and unattended RPA
To find a suitable RPA solution, we must consider the two categories of RPA, attended and unattended, to decide which is the best option for your organization.
Automatización atendida
Appropriate for repetitive and manual tasks related to the interaction with customers and the imitation of actions that the employee performs on their desktop or in their browser. It allows, through recording, to reproduce these operations and reproduce them in real time or shorten the steps necessary to complete the process.
Often used for desktop tasks or responding to prompts from a device.
Unattended automation
They are perfect for high-volume tasks within the organization. This kind of automation, as its name indicates, does not require the user to be present. Unattended bots perform tasks themselves by recording and replaying actions they have learned after being programmed.
They run desktop flows autonomously in virtual machines (VMs) or on your device.
| Attended Human Initiated | Unattended Fully automated | |
| General view | Automate manual tasks on desktop and web | Speeds up the automation of tedious and bulky tasks |
| Scenery | Automation on demand of the worker | Large-scale business process automation |
| Target User | Base developer in a company of any kind | Specialist (for now) in a department dedicated to RPA |
| Requirement | User with access on their devices/work | Tasks that bots/ |
Automate where you work with connectors and extensions
Microsoft RPA, to choose one of the leaders in the sector, has more than 500 connectors at your disposal, such as Salesforce solutions, Google and, of course, the Office services that you use every day.
If we continue with Power Automate, as we already explained in the linked articles, it belongs to the Power Platform. It allows you to create workflows that are triggered by a human action to trigger a response.
The real key to Power Automate is its ability to use more than 500 connectors. Of course, the main connectors are around the other Microsoft solutions: Office, Teams, Windows or Power Platform.
The ability to connect does not stop there. Power Automate is capable of connecting with other third-party services to further expand automation potential. This includes leading services like Salesforce, Google Drive, or Oracle, among many others.
What RPA licenses can I find?
The licenses and their price depend on whether the RPA is attended or unattended (by flows)
Microsoft offers three types of licenses for RPA within its Power Automate suite, to be able to choose based on the processes that you want to automate and the users that are going to use it.
From Itequia we can advise you to give you the best option for your business. Contact us and discover all the possibilities for your company.