With the recent introduction of Nintex Gateway, Nintex Workflow Cloud customers can create workflows that also include RPA bots to streamline core business processes.
Nintex Gateway allows organizations to extend the power of workflow automation to a broader range of enterprise processes.
Workflows can now delegate tasks to an RPA bot that can interact with applications, systems, services, and websites. That means less work is assigned back to human workers and organizations can leverage cloud workflow capabilities while protecting on-premises investments.
Nintex is the first to bring to market the ability to join automated workflows and RPA botflows™ for an unparalleled, comprehensive automation toolset.
In determining when to use automated workflows and when to turn to RPA, it is important to understand how they work together to improve process efficiency and effectiveness.
The bottom line: never use a screwdriver as a hammer!
“We use Nintex Workflow Cloud to automate and accelerate our core business processes. However, we sometimes need to automate tasks not suited for workflows – for example, tasks running on desktops or systems that don’t support APIs. These are best handled by RPA bots that mimic human keystrokes and mouse clicks. Now, with Nintex Gateway, we can use Nintex Workflow Cloud to call RPA Botflows™ to complete tasks, so the entire process is automated.”
– Alex Viera, solutions architect, Pacific BPA
So, what is workflow automation?
Workflow automation software helps organizations streamline many core business processes, allowing for individual tasks to automatically advance to the next stage of the overall process so enterprises run more efficiently, and people can focus on more important aspects of their job.
A purchase agreement is one example of an extremely manual process that can be easily automated using electronic forms and e-signature.
The distribution of documents throughout the process can be sent automatically at precisely the right time. Once submitted, the form data can automatically flow back to a CRM system that then sends an email to the professional services team to begin an onboarding process.
Some limitations to the process, however, can be accessing legacy systems. Organizations often want their workflows to include connectivity to on-premises applications like SQL server, legacy applications, or to interact with applications that have limited API functionality.
Even in cases where the API is fairly robust, it could be challenging to work through various screens to retrieve the target data from within an application. In many of these cases, workflows often include an “Assign a Task” step which sends an email to a human who then must take care of the steps manually so the process can get to its conclusion.
They may have had to create an appointment in Outlook, update an on-premises database or compare and update systems that can’t talk with each other like their CRM and finance systems.
When this happens, the process slows down, and errors are more likely to happen.
Now let’s talk about the benefits of RPA
Robotic process automation (RPA) helps solve this issue and brings a wealth of new possibilities to the automation toolset. RPA can access legacy systems without the need for developers and can allow the extraction of data quickly and easily.
RPA utilizes bots, or digital workers, which can perform similar actions as human workers. Bots can work non-stop at higher speeds, without errors by mimicking the same mouse clicks and keystrokes performed by humans.
RPA can be used for a wide variety of common business tasks including:
- Copying and pasting data from one system to another
- Opening emails and attachments, perform calculations and moving to a database
- Gathering data from websites or documents for other systems to use
Better together: Nintex workflow automation and Nintex RPA
Traditionally, organizations have had to choose to either use workflows or bots to automate their processes. Both have their strong points and limitations, so depending on the business need, organizations would choose the best one (or one they are most familiar with) and live with the outcomes.
But there is a solution. The Nintex Process Platform. We’re proud to offer our global customer and partner community an entire end-to-end, integrated experience by equipping them with the right automation tools for the job. Nintex Workflows and Nintex RPA – are both designed to be powerful and easy to use and now are integrated to tackle any automation challenge.
We encourage you to put Nintex Workflows and Nintex RPA Botflows™ to work within your organization by signing up for a demo of Nintex Workflow Cloud today.
