desktop automation tools Archives - Automatizează cu WinTask

With the rise of the latest technological trends, workflow technologies became more complex, especially for people who had never dived into backend programming.

When we think of automation, we usually imagine Artificial Intelligence or some complicated software. However, there is a separate area of automation that is becoming more and more popular. It’s called Desktop Automation. Let’s see what it is and how it works.

What is automation?

The concept of automation has now exceeded robotics that can supervise industrial development on a high level. Now automation can be defined as a process that requires minimum human effort.

Any business has processes that can be fully automated from the beginning to the end. However, there are still workflows that require human intervention. And that’s where attended Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) comes in handy.

RDA includes software robots (they are sometimes called bots) that every employee has on their desktop. These robots can navigate the complexities and dynamism of the desktop environment. This way, bots can provide real-time assistance or guidance to employees when they need it. That includes various things, from copying and pasting information to inputting data or even opening applications and doing specific actions.

Also, they can gather and analyze a more significant amount of data than a human being with 100% accuracy. These automated activities can be triggered by any type of event, such as switching tabs, a button click, or even a complex combination of several events.

To sum up, RDA makes it easier to work faster and more efficiently, simplifying routine workflows. It automates the most essential tasks that give the employees more time to focus on the things that matter most.

How has COVID-19 influenced the adoption of automation?

There are many ways to describe what the world is going through right now: defining a moment, turning point, or crisis. Whatever name seems fit, it means change, a long-term change.

According to the Forrester Consulting study ‘Pandemic Impacting Future of Work,’ the pandemic has sped up digital transformation and “forced the world of work to balance the dichotomy of employees seeking assurance and stability with organizations themselves pursuing resilience and agility.” The study also states that “Automation will define the post-pandemic world of work.”

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were faced with revenue disruptions. And with time, those disruptions only got worse, creating unprecedented financial pressure. This made businesses implement changes and move to digitalization and fast.

Such major digital transformations may have been projects for the future, but the COVID-19 pandemic moved it to the top priority. The Forrester study also claims that the world won’t just go back to the old ways of doing things when the pandemic reaches its end. Nowadays, automation is an essential asset to do business in this new world. Moreover, employee’s pre-pandemic anxiety of losing their jobs to automation became real.

57% of participants stated that their employees are pretty stressed out regarding their ability to succeed in their careers. And 14% claims that their employees feel intimidated by the increasing complexity of tasks.

These findings mean that businesses have to come up with a post-pandemic employee experience. As stated by the study: “Providing opportunities for education in the workplace and increasing employees’ transferable skill sets will help organizations sustain a growth mindset and make them fit for the future of work.”

What is Desktop Automation?

Desktop Automation is designed to automate actions or transactions in and across applications, simplifying and optimizing employees’ work.

For example, the world’s largest home furnishing retailer found an RDA solution to optimize the work. They used to have issues with order entry and automatic delivery systems. Applying Desktop Automation helped the company realize that they could display callouts on the agent’s screen — to fetch information about the open delivery slots. Eventually, the company saved a lot of time and improved its accuracy.

The use of automation leads to instant business benefits:

Error reduction
Automate desktop applications eliminating possible errors, which results in a higher level of processing quality.
Work optimization
Desktop automation users can spend more time on value-adding activities and rely on bots to process data and complete the tasks in no time.
Immediate response
Setting up triggers to set off responses to the events completing the entire process allows you to move things on to the weekend.

Desktop Automation versus RPA: what is the difference?

The main difference between RDA and RPA is an operations extent:

RDA interacts only with the applications a user works with on their desktop.
RPA can cover multiple applications, departments, or users.
RDA is excellent for businesses that just start automating their processes. It helps people to reduce manual tasks and focus more on other activities.
RPA works with applications used by the entire organization. Numerous users with different permissions can work together on the same process. These processes can cover multiple departments and will gain something with multiple moving parts.

What is WinTask?

Being the oldest company on the market, WinTask helps companies improve their productivity by minimizing costs and manual errors. It automates the repetitive tasks you need to accomplish, such as periodic reports, data collections, downloads, form filling, etc.

By making these tasks automatic instead of having to do them manually all the time, you can:

Save time. The tasks are done for you.
Improve quality. The tasks are performed correctly every time with no errors.
Avoid repetitive and tedious tasks. Free you up for better things to do.

Which industries can benefit from RDA?

Almost any industry can benefit from RDA if the target processes fit the set of essential requirements. One of the most common Desktop Robotic Automation examples is call centers because they have highly structured processes to make sure that a customer receives a consistent experience.

Usually, they need to access different systems such as CRM and perform several actions switching from one screen to another. But with RDA, they can complete these actions in one click.

In general, any industry with repetitive workflows can benefit from RDA automation.

Medical workflows
Medical staff can automate the patient intake process, administer patient data, and archive medical records to cloud storage.
Sales processes
Sales professionals automate recurring invoice generation, CRM updates, and client reminders.
Real estate and insurance contracting
With RDA, you can automate processing client data, extract client information from fillable forms, generate and archive invoices, and even client contracts.

Another example of RDA adoption is one of the leading financial organizations, BNP Paribas. Back in 2015, they implemented a desktop automation tool, and it changed the way of doing things.

Paribas tried the RDA solution which led to excellent results. The company reduced the average handling time to 80% and end-to-end delivery time to the customer by 90% with ROI in 3 months.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use and reliable RDA solution, WinTask is the best choice.

You will get…

Resource optimization. WinTask automates repetitive tasks and reduces any mistakes, saving hours of time and employee productivity.
Compatibility with legacy systems. Implement RDA with no need to make any changes to the existing system.
Adaptability & flexibility. No matter what happens, RDA programs will act on these changes automatically, making the business processes go smoothly.
Compliance management. RDA removes data gaps between unrelated sources and logs all completed actions, making it easy for employees to notice and act upon any compliance issue.

Nowadays, companies strive to improve customer experience and retention, regardless of their technological approach. The main difference between robotics process automation (RPA) and robotic desktop automation (RDA) can be explained best based on their scopes.

RDA versus RPA

In this blog post, we will explore the key differences between desktop automation versus robotic process automation.

Desktop robotic automation (RDA) is excellent for organizations that are just starting out automating their business processes. Desktop automation is scaled down to a single user. It assists people with tedious tasks during their daily activities.

For example, it can scrape data, automate Excel processes, transfer files or generate reports. You can also automate desktop applications to check a website for updates regularly or pull reports and send them via email to the correct recipient.

In case there’s an unfamiliar situation, the software can return control to its human partner. We’re talking about desktop automation tools such as WinTask, UiPath, HelpSystems, and others.

Let’s see a few more examples of how humans and bots can work together when developing a sales proposal:

The software bot will pull data from different sources, such as CRM systems, and assemble them for approval.
Employees can write a proposal while using the bot to automate other tasks, enhancing general productivity.

RDA suits best for workflows that can’t be completely automated but can benefit from automating particular processes. On the other hand, RPA is excellent for workflows requiring no human supervision or where it is not possible.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can be installed on a server, cloud instance, or virtual machine and works with the entire company’s applications. People with different permissions can work together in the same process.

For example, processing invoices seems like an excellent fit for RPA. However, each invoice is processed with numerous steps. It might retrieve an attachment from an email, categorize the attachment as an invoice, route the invoice for approval.

All of these RPA can handle. Or another example, where RPA bots can run overnight to update data and migrate at a time when everyone’s asleep. RPA can function almost independently.

If one looks up Google Trends, it is pretty clear that RPA is more prevalent among users than RDA. However, it always comes down to your needs as to which solution works best for you.

Whether desktop automation (RDA) or robotic process automation (RPA) is the right choice will depend on your situation, which is unique and can’t be foreseen. Using RDA can be great as a first step in adopting automating throughout your company. Your employees will be able to see the benefits of bots and make sure the bots can handle the tasks you assign to them.

RDA & RPA: the key features

Let’s go through the RDA key features first.

Customer experience enhancement. RDA helps employees to provide exceptional customer experience, as bots complete tasks fast with no errors.
Business compliance. RDA tools are 100% compliant with business rules.
Handles multiple records. RDA tools can go through various documents quickly to deliver outstanding results.
Visual workflows. Most RDA’s have workflow design tools that help users to understand the process in general.
Drag-n’-drop. Another key feature is the drag-n’-drop solution that makes it easy to build workflows.
Wizards. Wizards guide users through specific workflow steps and recording users’ actions, extraction of texts, and web service data exchanges, which users commonly face.

Moving on to RPA key features, let’s start with the crucial ones.

No-code solution. RPA tools allow people to automate business workflows simply by forming flowcharts. No knowledge of programming is needed.
Security. RPA has introduced role-based permissions. Thus it’s safe for all parties to operate within a significant process.
Dynamic adjustments. RPA adjusts itself dynamically in a running process.
Maximum resource utilization. Humans often take tasks that are not interesting to them, so they get bored to death. RPA is assigned the functions of humans, that they are capable of ending in a suitable time.
Cost reduction. RPA eliminates the scope of human hiring that may burden businesses with extra costs.

If you take a closer look at companies’ expectations, all of them need one thing: improve the effectiveness of the most commonly known business processes with a fast ROI. Unlikely that a company needs to automate all of the business processes or even 80%.

Most of them need to automate more or less 40% of the time-consuming day-to-day operations, and RDA works best for that matter.

Needless to say, implementing RDA will cost you less sometimes and can be done faster than trying to implement RPA with dozens of features you might not even need. Eventually, any company has a pragmatic results-driven approach, guided by the needs expressed by its business.

It focuses on general efficiency, regardless of the technology mix and the human or artificial intelligence involved. Sometimes it is enough to automate 60% of a process and leave the remaining 40% to a human to obtain ROI within a few months.

Summing up, we consider RDA a separate stand-alone piece of software that has proved itself a reliable assistant in removing routine tasks and making room for people to focus on the more essential things.

Tag: desktop automation tools

The Beginner’s In-Depth Guide to Desktop Automation