RPA Vs Traditional Automation Tools

Question

I am Test Automation engineer and recently got opportunity to explore RPA tool blueprism. After exploring I found it similar to UI automation tools supporting various technologi

Answer 1

RPA platforms provide you a singular place where various different type of applications can be automated.

These platforms fundamentally will try to consolidate and formalize the automation effort in an enterprise. and here the word "enterprise" is key.

for small businesses where they want to automate some task/s the intern can be asked to quickly build up something. no one cares what technology or tools were used. maybe he likes python, and someone else likes VBA. so a single task may be automated using several different technologies. no one cares as long as it works. the intern leaves and the next intern figures something new...

RPA platforms on the other hand are a larger "formal" effort that will try to automate tasks that otherwise require a lot of FTE (full time employee) count to accomplish. typical RPA use cases are repetitive tasks that humans are doing all day without using much brain. think of extracting each line item from a PO (purchase order) and putting it in an excel spreadsheet and then posting it on some internal application. now imagine a single guy doing this maybe for 100s of POs a day.

You cannot imagine how uneven the IT landscape in most of the enterprises is. old applications that were either built in house a long time ago or versions that arent being updated by the vendor any more. the bigger problem is when these applications do not have any integration points, so these RPA platforms provide the lease invasive (changes to old applications or upgrading even)

i can go on all day about RPA, do let me know if you have any follow up qns. i work for one of these RPA platforms, maybe i will be able to help.