Robotic Process Automation (RPA) emulates human interactions with digital systems or applications to accomplish repetitive tasks. RPA will analyze the screen, do mouse clicks, do key presses to navigate, extract data, perform tasks or anything else that you might want to automate.

RPA differs drastically from API connectors in the way it interacts with your systems and applications. With API connectors, our Wrk Automation platform will talk to your systems and application using machine to machine method of communication, which is fast and usually the preferred method for machines to interact with machines. However, not all systems and applications have APIs, or the APIs may be limited in its functions. Legacy systems are notorious for being difficult to automate for this reason. This is where RPA comes in - if a human can do it through a user interface, then RPA can simulate it and perform the same task.

If RPA can perform everything that a human can do, shouldn't it be the preferred method of automation? Why use API, OCR or any the other branches of automation? There are a few reasons, but it boils down to cost and complexity.

Simulating a human interacting with a user interface means that there is an extra layer of software - the RPA agent, that needs to be installed on the desktop where the application is running. It needs full access to view the screen, simulate the mouse or keyboard in order to accomplish its tasks. This extra layer complexifies the deployment as you need to involve your IT team and external experts need to come in to configure and make everything work with your organization's IT environment. The agent also technically has access to everything else on the users' machines where it is installed, even if they aren't meant to be automated. This opens up new risks that your compliance department will need to evaluate.

The complexity by itself increases the cost as multiple resources are needed and coordination is required to bring the project to completion. Maintaining a desktop RPA system over time is also costly for the same reasons. On top of the implementation and maintenance cost, RPA is usually licensed by a license seat for each RPA agent that is performing tasks. Desktop RPA is generally reserved for large enterprise organizations that have so much volume that the return on investment justify the high implementation and maintenance cost.

At Wrk, we took a different approach to desktop Robotic Process Automation to lower the barriers to entry and permit it to work well with the other automation methods for full end to end automation.

Wrk's RPA does not require RPA agents to be installed on desktop to perform tasks. Instead, the RPA agent stays on Wrk's infrastructure and connects to a virtual machine to perform the required tasks remotely. Virtual Machine is a mature technology that is easily accessible and has a low cost.

This approach does not remove the barriers to entry completely, but it does lower it drastically. Instead of having your IT service go through the installation of RPA agents on multiple desktops with all the downsides mentioned above, your IT service can instead spin up a VM with only the application that is required to perform the tasks. No 3rd party agent needs to be installed locally, not even on the VM. This gives your organization full control over what is exposed and there is no need to install any agent even on the VM.

With a simplified implementation approach and together with Wrk's consumption pricing model (outcome based) that does not require seat licensing, the cost of implementation is a fraction of traditional RPA. What was previously only accessible to large-scale organizations, is now within reach for most organizations allowing for automation where it was previously unreachable.

With RPA via Virtual Machine, Wrk's RPA allows you to automate tasks on your legacy or applications that are difficult to automate, and it also allows you to connect them to 1000s of other systems seamlessly. You can also leverage emerging automation technology such as AI or well-established ones such as OCR to improve processes around your legacy systems. Your old, isolated or legacy applications don't need to be isolated anymore making end to end automation feasible with one automation platform - Wrk's Automation.

There are a few downsides to this approach. For example, the RPA system is hosted on the cloud rather than on site. This can be a downside or an upside depending on your organization's IT strategy, but on-site is not possible with Wrk. A remote RPA agent also cannot constantly monitor user interactions to record and replicate the tasks, but instead need to be told exactly what to do. This differs from the traditional RPA approach, which is to watch and replicate, but from our experience - An RPA agent installed locally on a desktop rarely works out of the box and still need an expert to configure the steps.