JifJaff’s guide to the top 4 Robotic Process Automation Vendors
There are multiple Robotic Process Automation Vendors all offering their variations of Intelligent Automation (RPA). Software automation is not a one size fits all scenario.
Notwithstanding this, there are differences between the top four, recently rated by Gartner (UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and WorkFusion) and we aim to showcase what each Robotic Process Automation Vendor offers:
UiPath
UiPath is the fastest-growing enterprise software and Robotic Process Automation vendor in history. They are the leader in every Gartner Magic Quadrant, Forrester Wave, and Everest Peak Matrix for RPA. Number 1 in all Major Independent User Review sites for RPA including Gartner Peer Insights, GSCrowd, TrustRadius, Capterra, and ITCentralStation.
UiPath is a SaaS with acquired process-mining capabilities, SaaS-based RPA, conversational AI, and test automation. They can implement robotic software on-premises or delivered as a service. UiPath offers a visual process designer with developer-friendly options.
Their Visual Process Designer is a dashboard consisting of various tools through which the developer can define the automation tasks.
UiPath offers both application-based and browser-based accessibility.
Discovery – what can I automate, where is it, and why?
Task mining: The robot sits on workstations and monitors the work, reviews, and builds basic workflows based on its assessment for automation
Process mining: Bigger picture monitoring and evaluation. Capability includes multi-level process mining, organisation-level relationship mining, as well as process conformance features, including KPI-based process monitoring and the ability to perform gap and root-cause analysis.
Automation Hub: Enables individuals to submit and store ideas for automation to a centralised platform. This can be reviewed and ranked for suitability.
Task Capture: The capability to record and build itself basic automation.
Build – tools used to build your robots
StudioX a development environment for people with no prior software background or coding skills.
UiPath Studio, the original development environment, is meant for developers to build more complex automation.
Studio Pro has testing capabilities, comprised of Application Testing and RPA Testing, including Mobile Automation to cover all the testing. Uses UiPath RPA for testing
Deployment platform and management
Orchestrator
A server-based application that lets you orchestrate your Robots. It connects to all the Robots within the network, whether Attended, Unattended, or Free. Hold all workflows and schedules the delivery of the workflows based on predefined logic. Also, a provides reporting and statistics
Cloud Platform
UiPath’s secure automation for simplified compliance. Over time new capabilities will be added to this.
AI Fabric
End-to-end intelligent skill creation and deployment tool for businesses looking to automate processes with minimal effort. AI Fabric connects seamlessly with UiPath studio and Orchestrator to create a unified experience within all UiPath Platforms.
Test Manager
Provides testing for your application and RPA development lifecycle. It enables you to cover critical functions of your software by assigning tests to stories, requirements, or any issue for automated, manual, or explorative testing.
Robot type(s)
Attended desktop bots that are triggered by users to perform set function/workflows
Unattended should live in the Orchestrator can be scheduled and assigned to multiple workflows. These are the bits used to support/run your operations.
AI: Cognitive journey offering more Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
Test: Test bots
Measure
Insights RPA analytics solution that tracks, measures, and forecasts the performance of your entire automation program—so you can propel your automation journey to the next level.
Automation Anywhere
The Robotic Process Automation Vendor product platform is Automation Anywhere Enterprise. It usually bundled with AI-enabling IQ Bots, and can be hosted on-premises or delivered as a service.
Analytics
Bot Insight provides bot/workflow analytics,
Bots
Task Bots – are robots. They can execute repetitive, rule-based tasks based on prebuilt workflows.
Meta Bots – almost mini bot workflows, designed/reusable in such a way that with application updates or changes you need to make minimal edits to the bot.
IQ Bots Can ingest data & learn/be supported by people on its own and perform a task according to it. IQ Bot offers automation using highly advanced cognitive technology managing through fuzzy rules and processing unstructured data.
Merging cognitive capabilities with RPA, IQ Bots can understand structured or unstructured data then workflow based on the business rules & learn in real-time,
Home & Build
Control Room Where your bot lives
Bot Creator Where you build your bot
Blue Prism (Blue Prism Cloud)
Blue Prism includes on-demand scaling capabilities. They offer secured orchestration and management of RPA through preconfigured objects to identify the correct integration interfaces for each application in a workflow.
Blue Prism offer pre-integrated tools, including OCR with ML, and natural language processing (NLP).
Build
Object Studio Build process automation via a drag-and-drop interface, reuse “objects” – the events and actions that build a process – across the business
Library: Change permeate objects and process libraries
Control Room Assign processes to Digital Workers
Manage
Platform
Scale task and Digital Worker volume on-demand
Real-time transparency of process proficiencies
Digital Workforce (Bots)
Autonomous software robots, enhanced with AI and cognitive capabilities called Intelligent Automation Skills
WorkFusion
WorkFusion focuses on delivering an integrated end-to-end automation platform with native AI and best-in-class native automated machine learning and NLP capabilities.
Advanced handwriting capabilities, advanced structured form extraction, and support for complex documents such as contracts.
Pretrained bots: what & why?
Pretrained bots are built to automate the most time-consuming processes within specific industry domains quickly. Intelligent bots are pre-trained on a vast array of documents and data.
Document intelligence
Intelligent bots can understand complex documents with unstructured data to digitise, classify, make decisions, and extract data — and you will see the real impact right away.
These bots “learn” with each new document and example,
Analytics
Embedded advanced analytics to get a comprehensive overview of your most important business and technical KPIs across processes, bots, and people.
Identify
Case Navigator and discovery tools help identify and evaluate which processes have the highest automation potential.
Manage
Automation Orchestration: Leverage orchestration capabilities to manage end-to-end automation workflows efficiently.
Automation Studio:
Cloud and desktop tools enable seamless end-to-end workflow design and bot training for fast results.
Ability to Automate applications in a natural macro-like way without the need to code.
Access libraries of pre-packaged components and an IDE for advanced cases
Deployment
Deploy the platform on-premises or in the cloud quickly, and scale at pace without manual intervention.
Platform configuration, isolation of workflows across different lines of business, plus pre-packaged logging and monitoring provides IT teams with the required controls over the automated operations.
If you are looking to implement Intelligent Process Automation in your business, read our article “5 questions to ask if you are considering Intelligent Process Automation”