RPA and BPM with Business Rules Management. It’s not an “either, or” proposition.

If RPA takes the robot out of the human, BPM ensures that the human is focused on the right things. Repetitive, routine tasks can be eliminated so that the human can focus on the customer experience. While RPA deals with simpler tasks, not cognitive tasks, BPM with BRM guide the human to focus on his/her interaction with others whether internally or customer facing.

But when you really step back and look at this, what do RPA robots really accomplish? RPA is most useful when automating the control of a graphical user interface when the application does not offer an API. This is the sweet spot of RPA and where it’s most useful. We don’t like to discuss this part, but it’s called screen scraping. But what if the very same system that automates repetitive tasks and ensures business rules compliance also did what RPA could do without the need for screen scraping (which requires continual monitoring and updating of code when UI changes occur)?

Decisions for SAP Solutions™ is a complete development environment for both unattended (the RPA most of us know) and attended automation allowing you to apply workflow and business rules management to every kind of automation opportunity. Because Decisions for SAP Solutions™ has a unique ability to access tens of thousands of SAP RFC’s and BAPI’s, all of them in a drag-and-drop graphical editor environment, you’ve made every aspect of SAP available for RPA, both attended and unattended processes.

Sometimes the business can find going through IT frustrating because it’s so busy with other higher priorities. But what if you had a system that enhanced the collaboration between IT and the business? What if your development environment was not only conducive to automating the business but was usable, inexpensive, and didn’t require programming skills to implement because it’s zero-code? What if everything is drag-and-drop for the average person in the business?

That reality is today with Decisions for SAP Solutions™. You can now focus on controlling processes that involve humans and controlling processes that can bypass humans. This can be for SAP, Salesforce, or other systems of record. With such a development environment, you can then decide when it’s best to include humans and when it’s best not to. When you reduce the friction inherent in new processes by making everything zero-code with graphical design editors for every function, you enhance the collaboration between IT and the business. Only Decisions for SAP Solutions™ can do this today.

But, if you treat automation as a technology-led effort, you can doom your efforts to failure. Business Process Transformation goals can rarely, if ever, be tackled simply by introducing a new technical solution. Often there are other issues to address—data quality, changes in processes dictated by internal factors or external forces and other more complex processing requirements. Addressing the factors that enhance collaboration, like utilizing graphical design editors, enables the individuals to focus on meaningful process changes regardless of the interdependencies across technologies, departments, and strategies. Process redesign, or what’s known as process reengineering, is more successful when that’s the primary focus and not the coding effort involved.

Orchestrating RPA with BPM and BRM lets you enjoy the best of both worlds. It’s always best to integrate directly when that’s available as we do with Decisions for SAP Solutions™. We take it a step further by allowing you to use API’s, whether you are directing the work of an RPA robot or a human using BPM and BRM as your organizing development framework.