What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Imagine a different kind of workforce. A workforce that you can teach countless skills. The more it learns, the more efficient it becomes. It works without ever taking a vacation. It can quickly grow with your business and can work on different tasks, perfectly matching work demands. It can be small one day and large the next when your business hits a spike. And it frees up your best people to be your very best people. Meet software robots – the virtual workforce.*

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that automates business tasks and uses a software robot to perform tasks usually performed by a person.

The primary difference between RPA and traditional automation is that RPA does not require any development or integration with existing IT applications. RPA is a technology that uses an application’s user interface (UI) to automate a process rather than a traditional Application Programming Interface (API).

Any company that uses labour on a large scale for general knowledge process work, where people perform high-volume, highly transactional process functions, will boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation software. The robot accesses, reads, and writes into multiple applications in a rules-based manner, mimicking what a person can do but at greater speed and accuracy.

RPA provides dramatic improvements in accuracy and cycle time and increased productivity in transaction processing while elevating the nature of work by removing people from dull, repetitive tasks. It also provides organizations with an agile virtual workforce that is secure, consistent, reliable and scalable.

The automation of knowledge work will be this decade’s engine of growth. By freeing up human labour to provide additional capacity for more strategic work, RPA simply creates more value with less investment.

*Blue Prism