Attended vs. Unattended Automation
Hello traveler, are you confused about what kind of automation suits your RPA CoE, do you want to know what kind of automation addresses your problem statement or do you want to know the difference between attended and unattended automation ? Yay! this article will answer your queries.
As you know, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) frees employee from repetitive task, eliminates error, improves compliance by emulating human workforce. Depending on the kind of work, and how they’ll interact with people, bots fall into different breeds — Attended bots and Unattended bots.
Attended automation — Attended bots
Attended automation — as the name says, it is like a student or a kid who requires monitoring, attention of/for every activity. It is the bot which goes hand in hand with the user. It cooperates the user to reduce his work load by doing a part of his work like an assistant and hence you can also refer it as a cooperative or assistant bot.
The well known use cases are streamlining the work flows at Front office desk or Call centers. Here the executive can use this attended bots to fetch various details of the customer and display in few seconds while engaging the customer without wasting his time in switching between different applications to fetch the information. Thus it helps in reducing the call handle time and enhancing the customer experience.
As part of RPA CoE at a retail giant, with 2.7 years of experience as RPA Developer, I have seen how attended bots play a major role in bringing out the robot from employee, assisting in daily tasks there by allowing him to invest his time in productive work and thus adding value to the organization. One such real time use case on which I had worked on is preparing the daily gold price file for the master designs of the Jewelry and automating the task of uploading these files to storage drive and boutiques website.
Cooperative bots are triggered by the user or system events. Bots process locally from user system in order to accomplish partial automation thereby improving the employee productivity. In majority of the RPA tools, attended bots cannot be scheduled as it contrast the concept of going hand in hand with the user. They cannot be deployed from external system using APIs.
Unattended automation — Unattended bots
Unattended bots run without human intervention. It runs through scheduling or triggering through centralized control room or remote interface, sometimes it is accessed by wide range of employees in the organization. It automates the business process end to end independently without asking the user for any kind of information during the bot run.
As a RPA Developer who have automated around 20+ business processes for an american FMCG company and an Indian retail giant, I have witnessed how organizations make use of unattended bots 24/7/365. One of the use cases which I had worked on as a developer is — logging in to the organization email and downloading the MIS statements sent as an attachment for all the bank accounts of the organization followed by downloading the bank statements from the respective bank portal, preparing the ERP upload files by reconciling and uploading to the respective ERPs followed by capturing the document parking numbers for each of the upload and finally mailing a report of the uploaded bank details and document numbers to the process owner. This bot was scheduled to run once a day which runs for almost 3 hours as there were 16 banks and 50 bank accounts.
Unattended bots is suitable while automating end to end business process which handles huge volume of data. It provides opportunity to automate organization wide processes, enterprise level applications, servers and cognitive automation.
The ROI of Unattended bot is seen immediately as it removes workers from the task completely and reduces operating costs in the long run, whereas the ROI of Attended bot is seen down the line in the long run and moreover the major benefit and focus of Attended bot is to increase the productivity of the employee.
Which automation model should I pick ?
Picking attended or unattended automation model depends on two major aspects.
- Business goal — automation model has to address your business goal of what exactly you want to achieve, what are you more focusing on, is it something like ROI or productivity or both. Pick Attended automation if you have to increase the productivity of your employee or if you want to provide an assistant to your employee who automates the repetitive work for him. On the other hand, Unattended automation has both better productivity and ROI and can work 24/7/365 tirelessly handling huge volume of data and are more into back-office scenarios.
- Problem statement — each of these attended and unattended automation model suits particular problem statement and one should understand the problem completely to pick the automation model in order to address the issue precisely.
Thank you for reading!
