23 Jan, 2020 | Blogs
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a change enabler that has taken several industries by storm. It continues to garner a lot of attention as businesses realize its importance in automating front office and back-office tasks. Market research company Forrester forecasts the RPA market to skyrocket to $2.9 billion by 2021 from merely $250 million in 2016. This is because RPA’s applications are boundless. RPA platforms help create bots that interact with several software applications and mimic humans to automate repetitive work. There are two types of bots: attended and unattended RPA bots.
Definition of Attended and Unattended RPA bots
Attended and unattended RPA bots are two modes that can work with or without human intervention.
RPA bots can work in both “attended” and “unattended” modes. Typically targeted toward front-office activities, attended bots are created in a situation when it isn’t possible to automate the entire end-to-end process. In such cases, the RPA bot is triggered by system-level events and work alongside human workers to take data to and from them.
Unattended RPA bots, like the name suggests, are executed without user intervention of humans and work along with other applications. They can be triggered by events and are usually used to perform batch operations. For instance, unattended RPA bots can extract customer data from one spreadsheet and automatically enter it into the required application.
Advantages of Unattended RPA Bots
- Unattended RPA bots work without or very little human intervention
- Unattended automation is self-triggered by other software applications
- Unattended RPA bots work 24×7, 365 days in a batch-mode model
- It can be accessed remotely through several interfaces or platforms.
- It gives greater scope for collaboration and communication since the administrators can modify functions in real-time and have full access to analyze and deploy scheduling, as well as reporting, auditing, and monitoring within a centralized hub.
- The most popular use of unattended RPA bots is in back-office where a huge amount of data is collected, sorted, analyzed and disbursed
Advantages of Attended RPA Bots
- Attended automation requires users’ or administrators’ intervention.
- It is usually on the employers’ workstation and is executed by specific events, actions, or commands.
- Attended automation is agile and needs to be user-friendly since the staff needs to juggle multiple interfaces or screens.
- Attended automation is more than often housed in a workstation, thereby limiting the employee engaging with it in a specific workflow.
Working Together With Unattended and Attended RPA Bots
The relationship between an unattended and attended RPA bot can be best described as symbiotic. While organizations can deploy either of the two solutions based on their needs, an integrated platform that combines the two is considered ideal. When attended and unattended bots work together, both customer-facing tasks and back-office work is automated, making the workforce more productive and efficient.
Additionally, companies get more versatility by deploying both RPA bots even though each has its own distinct features and characteristics. It allows businesses to scale up or down the function based on budgets, workload, and other operational aspects without any noticeable work stoppage. In other words, it reduces the chances of breakdown or disruptions across an organization’s value chain.
Making RPA More Accessible
Nuummite Consulting is a partner of leading RPA platforms that allow the deployment of either both or one of the bots in a cost-effective manner. The wide range of experience of our RPA experts gives them the ability to address end-to-end solutions rather than just focus on a slice of the issue. We combine both business and technology excellence and expertise to ensure your automation journey is as smooth as possible and you get the maximum return out of your investment.
Final Thoughts
Even though unattended and attended RPA bots aren’t mutually exclusive, they play a critical role in the deployment of automation. While attended bots help get work done faster, unattended bots execute tasks and independently work alongside several applications.
The combination of both unattended and attended RPA bots, therefore, makes a holistic RPA solution. They both collectively add up to a key value proposition for companies, which is the ability to work leaner, faster and with more accuracy. By increasing efficiency and productivity, both attended and unattended RPA bots eventually deliver better customer experience and a much better product or service.