Beyond RPA: How to Build Toward End-to-End Process Automation

Beyond RPA: How to Build Toward End-to-End Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation has come of age and Forrester Research predicts RPA market revenue is on target to reach $2.9 billion in 2021. It’s not hard to see why this market is maturing fast, with RPA promising an easy and quick fix to automate many of the manual, repetitive tasks that require manual data input or an exchange of data with an inflexible legacy system. RPA bots can be deployed quickly and deliver an immediate productivity boost, not to mention significant cost savings.
However, today’s RPA market is vast. You can find everything from vendors promoting low-code solutions to code-heavy approaches, all marketed under the RPA banner. So it’s becoming imperative to differentiate “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA) from “Process Automation” (sometimes also referred to as “workflow automation”) , which perform very different functions, because when it comes to automating business processes end-to-end, you are looking at a set of different problems that require a diverse set of tools.

This is what Gartner addresses with the concept of “Hyperautomation,” its #1 IT
Trend for 2020:
“As no single tool can replace humans, hyperautomation today involves a combination of tools, including robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent business management software (iBPMS) and AI, with a goal of increasingly AI-driven decision making.”
In the wider automation picture, RPA plays an important role to automate parts of a
business process. Other parts may still be completed by humans, (micro-)services,
IoT devices, or AI/ML components etc. Thus RPA products and end-to-end process
automation products like Camunda are complementary. You can combine them
by letting Camunda orchestrate RPA bots together with other parts of a business
process.
In this whitepaper, we’ll explore the best applications of RPA, as part of a wider
digital transformation journey toward end-to-end process automation.