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How to Use Bizagi and RPA to Achieve True Digital Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is increasingly being used by businesses to carry out basic, repetitive tasks that would ordinarily be carried out by humans, such as form-filling and calculations. With its promising ability to increase operational efficiencies, many organizations are already using the automation technology.

According to a survey of 450 companies by consulting firm Protiviti, all of which use and profess to be at least “knowledgeable” about RPA, all said they plan to expand their use of the technology over the next two years.

But while it can be quick and fairly straightforward to deploy RPA, it won’t solve your underlying process issues. Deploying RPA without ensuring good business processes are in place is like putting an automated car on the road when there are big potholes and lots of route closures. It makes things efficient in the short term but doesn’t solve underlying problems.

Read on to find out more about how Bizagi and RPA work well together, or if you want to learn a bit more about RPA first, take a look at our blog: 6 Questions You Need to Ask Before Starting an RPA Project.

Bizagi and RPA– bridging the gap

A Digital Process Automation (DPA) platform such as Bizagi can enable enterprise-wide transformation in productivity, efficiency, agility, and compliance. Bizagi creates an agile orchestration layer that wraps around your existing systems to connect the people, applications, devices, and information across your organization on one secure and scalable platform. RPA then enables robots, also know as digital workers, to be configured to complete routine tasks normally carried out by humans. Phrases like this can spark panic, as people worry that robots will be making humans redundant.

But, as discussed in our previous RPA blog, rather than replacing jobs, it will simply enhance them. Digital workers will assist us with our work, rather than disrupt or replace us. RPA can take over menial, day-to-day tasks, allowing people to focus on higher-value activities. This will help drive down costs and provide better customer service. KPMG estimates that the labor eliminated by RPA reduces cost by an average of 45% to 75%.

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Bizagi is valued for its ability to marry new technology with legacy enterprise applications. Legacy applications can, in turn, greatly benefit from the introduction of RPA as it substitutes routine, manual tasks for automated ones. Enterprises “see RPA as part of their automation strategy” because it “boosts productivity with minimal process change [and] brings an easy-to-calculate ROI,” Forrester said in their Robotic Process Automation Wave report. Used together, Bizagi and RPA can help you to achieve true digital process automation.

 

Automating business processes

Bizagi handles end-to-end process automation and digitizes business operations. It’s effectively a blueprint for the business. RPA can then be put to work on this by automating manual repetitive tasks or data entry within a process.

Using Bizagi as a platform, you can blend traditional process techniques with additional capabilities to automate processes easily while managing end-to-end processes. Within those processes, RPA can automatically carry out back-office tasks such as finance, customer services, data entry, purchasing orders or creating online credentials. This, in turn, delivers enterprise-wide intelligent automation.

Bizagi and RPA can be used for a wide variety of solutions across industries, such as automating sales, onboarding new customers, underwriting and claims processing in financial services. Or utility companies who are automating customer service processes. Manufacturers are automating processes in their factories, and logistics companies are using Bizagi and RPA to increase efficiency and save costs around their supply chain.

Take the employee onboarding process for example: Bizagi will manage the end-to-end process, including tracking and analytics. Once the job offer is confirmed, a candidate accepts and a start date is agreed, a new employee set-up is required. Bizagi can then instruct a robot to initiate the new employee set-up process and a virtual manager powered by RPA can log into the application portal, and add the new user to the system.

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Bringing sense to data

Simply applying RPA to an inefficient process won’t solve all your problems. You will likely still have underlying issues. While RPA can interact with interfaces and carry out repetitive tasks, it is not an intelligent tool. As highlighted by UiPath, “RPA is unable to directly manage unstructured datasets, requiring robots to first extract and create structured data using advanced capabilities such as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language recognition (NLR). RPA is then able to sort and manage what is essentially a transcription from unstructured to structured data to help companies execute any number of processes.”

Bizagi can bring logic to this unstructured data and orchestrate the information to get it ready to be used by the robots. This is where one of our customers is making use of Bizagi as an enabler for RPA.

A leading financial services provider is deploying RPA in their commercial lending spaces and is using Bizagi to digitize all the data upfront and create uniformity through the workflows. This allows the robots to be more efficient and automate more processes because there is a formalized workflow in place, which then instructs the robots through APIs. This has enabled robots to operate over 50% of their loan portfolios. The bank is now using RPA to book new loans and customers and do overall maintenance on the lifecycle of commercial lending.

While RPA certainly has plenty of values, remember that it won’t solve underlying process problems. Bizagi delivers end-to-end process automation while RPA handles the repetitive tasks and data entry within a process. By using the two together, you will be able to carry out processes with greater accuracy, fewer errors and less risk of fraud. Bizagi is the only platform on the market that provides native integration for the three leading RPA vendors: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath.

See Bizagi and RPA action

To find out more, watch the video below, ‘Robotic Process Automation or Business Process Management, or Both?’ where Craig Le Clair, VP Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, and I talk through RPA’s relationship with AI and DPA, and propose a blueprint for an overall digital operating model.