What's the difference between attended and unattended RPA?

What’s the difference between attended and unattended RPA?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is helping businesses all over the world every single day. It’s making their businesses more efficient, reducing errors and ultimately improving their profitability when executed well. But when you’ve been looking at different RPA solutions, you may have seen some are ‘Attended’ and others are ‘Unattended’ (also sometimes ‘ Assisted ‘ and ‘ Unassisted ‘). You might have wondered, what is the difference between the two?

First of all, let’s look at what RPA is. TechTarget defines it as, “software that can be trained to mimic digital data tasks performed by humans”. In short, we like to think of RPA as doing the grunt work for you, so you can focus on where you really add value.

Attended RPA

Attended RPA are solutions that work alongside humans to help them with their day-to-day tasks. Humans will provide some level of basic input and the automation software will analyse this and do, as above, the grunt work. These sort of solutions are great for client-facing processes as they enable you to do your business faster, whilst providing a high level of quality to your customers.

Unattended RPA

Unattended RPA, in comparison, requires no human interaction at all. This means processes can be triggered, analysed and executed all without any human input. These processes can, therefore, happen 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with no human fatigue or errors.

Unattended RPA is mainly used in back-office, repetitive tasks. Think of accounting processes, batch operations or entering of client data – generally speaking they will be rules-based tasks.

Which should I pick?

Both options are equally valuable to your business, so it isn’t as simple as one is better than the other. What you need to do is look at your process first, then decide which type is more appropriate. Is the task more sensitive and therefore need human oversight? Yes? Well you’ll probably want an attended solution. If it’s highly repetitive with a limited number of rules that could be set up, then unattended may be best for you.

Doc2 is an attended automation solution, drastically speeding up the contract creation, sending and eSigning process for SME businesses. It gives the user full oversight and control of their contracts, whilst reducing errors and mistakes.