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Automation technology available today promises benefits ranging from improving processes to increasing productivity to building on existing software to solve more sophisticated problems. But the crowded marketplace makes it hard to determine which solution is right for your business and what benefits you can expect to experience.
This will post is designed to help business leaders understand the changing automation landscape and make smart decisions about the automation solutions that are best for your organisation.
Organisations across industries and sectors, regardless of their prior level of digital sophistication, are now faced with the challenge of adapting to an unprecedented pace of digitisation and navigating an uncertain future in a changing world.
This heightened focus on digitisation is propelling a new wave of automation. A key capability in helping organisations advance their digital transformation efforts, automation gives businesses the power to innovate by helping them do more with less. However, as the scope of what you can automate has evolved, so too have the questions.
Understanding the key components of automation technology and when to use them is a good starting point.
Understanding DPA vs. RPA vs. AI
Digital Process Automation (DPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are three components of โintelligent automationโ that can work independently or together.
Digital process automation
DPA is a method of automation that uses software to perform processes and automate tasks with the goal of completing and optimising a workflow. DPA automates workflows between modern (API) cloud-based services and connects them together. DPA is commonly used to automate tasks that typically require some form of human interaction, often in business workflows related to sales and marketing, IT, management, and production.
Robotic process automation
RPA allows you to configure software, or a virtual โrobot,โ to emulate and integrate the actions of a person interacting with digital systems to execute a business process. RPA automates workflows between modern and legacy (nonAPI) systems. It automates the user interface (UI) of the desktop through a designer or recorders that automate your mouse and keyboard actions. RPA is often used for largescale automation of human activities that are rules-based, manual, and repetitive, as well as for exchanging data with legacy, on-premises software that is still essential in many enterprises.
Artificial intelligence
AI is the capability of a computer system to mimic human-like cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving. AI technologies augment human judgment and behaviour using unstructured inputsโunlike RPA, which replicates rules-based human actions. Increasingly, AI and RPA are used together to automate more complex processes that allow people to work smarter and faster.
AI helps organisations detect patterns in large volumes of data and interpret their meaning, and is often used in predicting customer behaviour, fraud detection, and financial forecasting.
Of the three types of intelligent automation, RPA tends to be popular with enterprises, due to the ease of implementation and high ROI. When an organisation decides on RPA, they can choose โattended,โ which requires human interaction, โunattended,โ which runs in the background on its own, or a hybrid approach.
Introducing Power Automate
Power Automate, Microsoftโs unified, comprehensive cloud-based automation platform, bridges DPA, RPA, and AI in a single, low-code SaaS offering that supports both attended and unattended scenarios. Power Automate democratizes intelligent automation by empowering everyoneโfrom citizen developers and business users to professional developers alikeโto seamlessly build secure, automated solutions. From simple tasks to complex enterprise-wide processes, you can automate almost any undertaking across your organisation with business process management (BPM), RPA, and AI, all accessible in one user-friendly platform.
With Power Automate, you can automate both modern applications with APIs, or legacy applications with incomplete or missing APIs. You can even combine legacy apps, modern apps, and manual processes in a single automation through a browser or the user interface of your Windows applications. And with Power Automate Desktop, you can automate everything from simple data transfers to complex business workflows directly from your desktop using RPA desktop flows (Cloud flows, Business process flows or Desktop flows).
What Power Automate can do for you
Power Automate gives your teams the tools they need to do their jobs effectively, regardless of whether they are remote or onsite, while improving productivity, increasing the quality of work, and freeing up resources for more strategic initiatives that will help your business grow.
Built with both technical and non-technical professionals in mind, Power Automate offers thousands of prebuilt templates so you can start automating standard business processes immediately. A Microsoft 365 license gives you Power Automate cloud flow capabilities, and you donโt need any third-party software to get started.
