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Using machines to perform human work is not a recent practice, but technological advances brought more and more new alternatives and tools capable of improving performance within companies, being adaptive and versatile to follow constant and rapid market changes.
Companies have implemented several software systems capable of automating their tasks, contributing to digital transformation, and achieving their set goals.
In recent years, the acronyms DPA and RPA have gained prominence for their importance and for the competitive differential they can generate. But after all, what are RPA and DPA and how can they be used in your company? Read on, and check it out!
What is RPA?
Do you know those routine, repetitive tasks, such as sending charges, logging into an application, searching sites like SERASA or Receita Federal, verifying forms, updating spreadsheets, and copying data, among others? With RPA you literally have a robot to perform them, without errors and working 24 hours a day.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology where automation is accomplished with software-robots capable of simulating and perfectly reproducing repetitive human actions. Basically, all you have to do is to configure the robot, and it performs the set tasks based on rules, which increases productivity, reduces errors, and gives employees the opportunity to dedicate themselves to strategic efforts and make a difference within the company.
By being able to communicate with other systems, RPAs speed up processes and reduce the overall workload. Using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, it automates repetitive tasks to ensure they’re completed with consistency, accuracy, reliability, and superior speed, without requiring breaks. It can be used in various departments within a company, as long as its processes are based on rules.
Robotic Process Automation is a very simple tool, capable of being adapted to the infrastructure and systems that any given organization uses. It’s common to find low-code RPA platforms where the user himself can create his own robot with little or no help at all from the IT department.
What is DPA?
Digital Process Automation (DPA), uses different technologies to automate steps, activities, and tasks to help with a company’s processes management (BPM) from end to end, providing a broad, integrated overview directly related to the organization’s objectives.
Based on BPMN principles, with DPA processes mapping and automation is performed from end to end, which means that the activities are carried out in a simpler and standardized, logical, and collaborative way. Since the interactions and responsible parties are well defined, the tasks are completed in a correlated manner, regardless of whether they are sequential or parallel.
Another usefulness of DPA is its information recording capability, which allows performance analysis to be carried out assertively, spotting bottlenecks, reducing cycles, and facilitating process management and monitoring.
To learn how to map or understand where your company is in process automation, access this ebook and improve your processes.
What are the differences?
Now that you understand each of these tools, let’s go deeper into their differences.
First, we need to clarify that their main contraposition is in their applicability. While RPA is about automating tasks, DPA can be used for complete processes and workflows, including those that are long and complex, because it has the ability to map and automate steps from start to finish. Processes are represented with BPMN notation, including interactions between actors, enabling clearances, and decision rules configuration. DPA is much broader, as it works with the entire process, involving several sectors and users.
Thus, Digital Process Automation standardizes procedures, improving or creating a new process that follows a certain execution logic, facilitating communication between departments, allowing employees to interact more assertively with the systems and perform their activities quickly, with information traceability, secure data storage, and the ability to monitor the entire process and the interactions.
Another difference is that DPA allows human interaction with electronic forms, while RPA works with specific, repetitive, and costly tasks, has a shorter duration, and user interaction is non-existent.
In short, DPA automates and RPA robotizes, but both exist to boost the company’s performance and take its digital transformation further.
How to use DPA and RPA in my company?
Okay, now you understand the differences between the two, but a question remains: can I use both tools? How do I combine their execution to optimize our work routine?
Processes that use DPA rely on RPA for repetitive or time-consuming tasks, benefiting and speeding up the process. For example, within a given sales process that has been mapped and automated, it’s possible to configure a robot to complement the data of a registration where the address is based on the zip code of the street, so when the user types in the matching numbers, the robot queries the Post Office website, and in a matter of seconds it fills in the related address fields such as street and district names. This is just one example of the many functions that the tools are able to provide when complementing each other.
Finally, it’s essential to continue measuring the performance of the processes that were automated with DPA, both to enhance their flow and to find other tasks where RPA could be useful.
Both tools have rapid development, standardize activities and workflow, have easy integration with other systems, have data traceability, reduce errors and costs, and enable performance analysis.
Want to test DPA and RPA?
Companies are increasingly emphasizing the focus of their intellectual capital on their core business, leaving for software everything that is not considered essential, especially those activities that do not require decision and are repetitive.
It may seem complex to know which processes should be automated within your company, so it’s important to rely on a complete tool and experts who understand your needs and implement it correctly to improve the results obtained.
Fusion Platform is a complete, user-friendly, and low-code platform. And the best of all is that you can test Fusion for 15 days for free and understand in practice how DPA and RPA can be important tools for your success.
