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Unattended Versus Attended Bots — Which Ones are Right For Your Business?

More and more processes are becoming automated for businesses of all sizes. Affordable automated processes are now feasible for companies, regardless of industry or company mandate.

With the rise of business automation and lowered cost requirements of automating common business tasks, robotic process automation or RPA provides needed services that can overcome common business challenges and eliminate manual processes that are error-prone and time-intensive.

This article will cover everything bots, specifically RPA and unattended and attended bots, and how they can help your business.

What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?

RPA refers to software that automates common business tasks. You can purchase RPA with designated tasks to complete, or you can automate processes specific to your workflow and industry.

Tax software is a form of RPA. You can automate the sending of receipts, promissory notes, invoices, and more to clients and customers, while automatically filling in tax forms for your company accountant with the click of a button.

RPA processes can fulfill low-level tasks that employees can perform. If money is tight, or you want your employees to focus on specialized tasks and skillsets, you can use RPA to take over these simplistic tasks.

Unattended Bots Vs. Attended Bots: What’s the Difference?

Bots solve tasks, it’s that simple. Whether you use unattended or attended bots, automate the software and let it do the work. Bots can perform tasks for your business with or without constant guidance from an employee or multiple employees, depending on whether you choose to use unattended or attended bots.

You can also choose both if you want to mix and match how involved your employees are when automating tasks like sending order confirmation emails to clients or updating invoices based on electronic purchase orders.

Unattended bots require no human interaction. These bots are designed to tackle repetitive and frequent tasks at scale. For example, unattended bots are ideal for manual data entry, repetitive admin tasks, monitoring data streams, and other similar tasks.

Attended bots require human interaction. These bots handle simple tasks that make up larger, more complex processes. They often work in tandem with humans to automate complex workflows. Attended bots are not designed for scale. Instead, you should think of them as individualized personal assistants. For example, a customer service rep interacting with a client may use an attended bot to pull customer data during the call.

Which Bot Type is Right For Your Business?

If you want to retain a bit more control over your business bots, choose attended bots. If you have experience with bots and want to automate these processes even more than your normal amount, choose unattended bots.

You can choose both; you do not need to limit yourself to choosing one or the other.

Businesses without experience with bots should choose attended bots to start before moving onto unattended bots. You can use attended bots for some processes and unattended bots for other processes.

Companies experienced with technology, especially RPA or bots, can skip attended bots and go right to implementing unattended bots.

Adopting RPA in Your Business

RPA adoption can be a significant part of the project management process. As you are planning projects and processes, consider which tasks can be automated to save time and increase project efficiency. Fulfilling projects under budget and ahead of schedule is a much more realistic process when bots and RPA can automate many lower-level tasks that require minimal knowledge and skillsets.

Repetitive, low-level tasks are prone to human error. Such tasks take valuable time and money away from more important tasks. These tasks no longer need to be done by human employees but can be performed by automation software in fractions of a second.

Adopting RPA can save you time, money, and efficiency, as well as raise employee morale.

If you are hesitant to add bots, consider the fact that you already have. If you use GPS for delivery runs, you are automating route mapping from a manual process to an electronic version. If you use Microsoft Word, you are automating the creation of a business document instead of writing it out by hand.

Specific bot software and automation are no different than a manual process an employee uses to finish a task faster and under budget.

Key Differences Between Unattended and Attended Bots

While both types of bots can help your business, key differences exist between unattended and attended bots.

Consider attended bots like an extension of your employees. Employees can make decisions and choose actions for these bots to perform. Bots need to be assigned tasks to complete. They cannot undertake actions independently.

Unattended bots are like employees themselves. You direct these bots to fulfill tasks and provide them the autonomy to perform actions within a predetermined framework. Unattended bots can therefore seem to act independently, even though they are not. Such bots can finish employee tasks much quicker than manual processes and require minimal interaction from human operators.

Although these key differences between unattended and attended bots are clear, different definitions may exist depending on the industry jargon you use and the specific software you purchase. However, in simplistic terms, unattended bots are “unattended,” and attended bots are “attended.”

Ready to Transform Your Business With RPA? Tangentia Can Help

Tangentia has almost two decades of experience providing automated solutions, like unattended and attended RPA, for customers worldwide.

Whether you need business solutions like AI, EDI, RPA, or B2B integrations, we can help. Book a discovery call today to see what RPA can do for your business.

Choosing Between Attended and Unattended Bots For Your Business. Learn more about attended and unattended bots in regards to which your business should leverage in our eBook.

Choosing Between Attended and Unattended Bots For Your Business

Learn more about attended and unattended bots in regards to which your business should leverage in our eBook.
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How Automation Is Enabling the Energy Transition in Oil & Gas

In today’s fast-changing world, the oil and gas industry must keep up with the energy transition that is underway. With fluctuating oil prices, climate change, the rise of new energy resources, changing consumer behavior, energy poverty, and the pandemic that has engulfed the world, the energy sector is facing many challenges.

It is time for oil and gas companies to pivot within the energy sector by changing their core business model and operational strategies to increase their agility. This will allow them to grow and scale their business within these challenging times. Automation is the key here. It is not just one component of this change—it is the platform on which this change is built.

With this in mind, there are four key areas in which automation can help oil and gas companies not only survive the energy transformation but thrive in it.

Increased Efficiency and Reduced Costs

Automation is paving the way to increased efficiency and reduced costs, which are vital in these days of increased industry volatility. Back-office processes, such as invoicing and HR processes, can be fully automated, saving thousands of human hours and allowing humans to focus on more important tasks.

More than that, automation has reached the field. It can improve health and safety, help with routine and predictive maintenance, and improve the collection and analysis of field data, making connections between that data and data from other areas of the industry and drawing meaningful insights from the data.

Communications in the field are aided with the use of bots that can relay information with the use of voice command and improve communications between the home office and the field. This is what Tangentia’s TiA platform is capable of. Ultimately, this allows workers to do their jobs more quickly, more accurately, and more thoroughly than ever before, reducing costs, reducing error, and making the entire end-to-end operation more efficient.

Direct Relationship with Customers

Oil and gas companies have traditionally been more behind-the-scenes in the energy sector, not interacting directly with energy customers. However, the customers of today want service that is fast, convenient, and tailored to their specific needs. TiA makes that possible by allowing oil and gas companies to improve the customer experience through the use of conversational artificial intelligence (AI).

AI can use natural language to communicate with customers through a variety of media, such as SMS text messaging, phone, email, and web-based chat. This allows customers to get the personalized service they want when they want it while freeing up the human workforce to focus on building stronger customer relationships. It also allows oil and gas companies to be better able to match up supply with demand.

Increased Value from Data

Automation in the oil and gas industry is improving the collection, management, and analysis of data. With exponential increases in the amount of data collected, automation is required to analyze that data and pull key insights from it. This makes an oil and gas company’s data a more valuable resource than ever before.

The insights derived from this data make it possible for an oil and gas company to pivot more quickly and easily in an ever-changing industry. They can see where they are losing money and where efficiency can be increased, and they can more readily identify valuable opportunities.

Increased Innovation

With the arrival of the digital age, oil and gas companies have been spurred to come up with new innovations that will allow them to shift to a platform-based business model that takes advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile development platforms, and open-source software. This makes it possible for oil and gas companies to make use of automated data analysis to come up with innovative solutions to technical challenges and develop new capabilities.

Tangentia’s TiA platform is a valuable tool in the shift to automation. We have a variety of bots to serve your needs, from finance to invoicing, supplier management to timesheet management and so much more. With TiA your oil and gas company will be on the cutting edge of automation.

To learn more about automation and Tangentia’s TiA platform, reach out to speak with a team member today. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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RPA Can Help Oil & Gas Weather Industry Volatility

We live in a world of uncertainty, a world in which COVID-19 continues to rage around us, disagreements between OPEC countries in early 2020 caused tension in the industry, and the world economy continues to suffer. This has resulted in unstable crude oil prices. In in the early months of 2020, the price of crude oil fell drastically. While these prices have rebounded, uncertainty still hovers like a spectre above the Oil & Gas industry.

Oil & Gas companies are working hard to navigate this unprecedented time in history, looking for ways to cut expenses as energy prices remain unstable. Cutting back on development, deferring projects to a future date, and focusing on regions that offer high tax incentives are all traditional tactics that help stem losses.

However, there is another solution that the Oil & Gas industry has previously been slow to adopt, yet can result in significant cost savings and increased productivity. It is the adoption of robotic process automation (RPA), which makes it possible for Oil & Gas companies to streamline processes and operations like never before.

What Is RPA?

RPA is an automation technology that uses intelligent software-based robots or “bots” to intelligently perform tasks that are important, yet repetitive and time-consuming. The result is that processes can be completed more quickly, while eliminating human error. This, in turn, results in increased productivity, lower costs, and the ability to free up employee time to complete high-value tasks.

How RPA Can Help

RPA can benefit upstream, midstream, and downstream Oil & Gas operations, improving and simplifying processes and so much more. From enhancing exploration and production with the use of powerful data analytics to monitoring field infrastructure and equipment to automating all aspects of shipping logistics, RPA can save thousands of human work hours. This leaves your employees with the time to analyze the data and make decisions that can mean the difference between just getting by and thriving. Here are some examples of how RPA can make a significant difference:

Enhanced Exploration

The interpretation of seismic data is critical when it comes to discovering potential drill sites. RPA algorithms can be set up to take raw seismic data, migrate and organize it and conduct a visual interpretation of that data, something that takes hours to do manually.

In addition, when exploratory wells are drilled and core samples are taken, the data from the samples can be fed into an RPA algorithm that can identify the presence of microfossils that are indicative of favorable geological layers for the presence of oil. In addition, the algorithm can analyze the porosity of the rock and estimate the amount of oil recovery that can be expected from cross-sectional images of the core samples.

Pipeline Monitoring

A great example can be seen with pipelines, which have become an increasingly important part of the transportation of oil and gas over long distances. RPA can be used to monitor and maintain thousands of kilometers of pipelines safely and accurately.

The data and reports that are sent in from field workers would take hours to go through manually. However, RPA can search through massive amounts of data within seconds, pulling meaningful insights from it that you then have time to review and analyze, so you can provide the best possible feedback to your field operators.

Optimization of Oilfield Services

Thanks to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), sensors can be placed on all types of equipment, from service trucks to wells to chemical additive totes. RPA can then be programmed to analyze the data that comes in from these sensors, allowing intelligent cross-referencing of the chemicals, equipment and transport required in the field to the control of inventory and transportation management. In addition, RPA can be programmed to access data related to past safety incidents to determine systemic root causes so they can be addressed, improving overall safety in the field.

Predictive Maintenance

RPA can be programmed to take the unstructured data from operator logs and cross-reference that with the design specifications of the equipment, historical operational data, and records related to inspections and repair. The analysis of this data over time will allow the software to create a maintenance schedule for all equipment and automatically create and send out work orders for maintenance tasks as they are needed. This will prevent equipment downtime and ensure the equipment continues in good operation for its expected operational lifetime.

How to Get Onboard with RPA

Adopting RPA to automate processes and improve data management is a critical part of decreasing costs, increasing productivity and improving your bottom line. This means that RPA adoption is also a critical aspect of weathering the price fluctuations in crude oil as we ride out this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

However, the adoption of RPA has to be approached in the right way. It is vital that you assess your business and operational objectives and determine which processes should be automated first to provide you with the greatest advantage. One of the best things about RPA technology is that it can be customized to suit your unique circumstances and can be scaled to meet the changing needs of your company and the industry in which you operate.

To find out more about what RPA can do for your Oil & Gas company and how we can help, reach out to Tangentia’s automation team today.

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RPA and Bots Helping Organizations Maintain Operations and Protect Employees

With the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic that is spreading rapidly throughout an increasing number of countries, the impact to the economy is already being felt. The stock markets are in turmoil and the OECD reports that the global economy is at risk of dropping 2.4% in 2020. Yet, we are also seeing an unprecedented response from governments, companies and other organizations around the world.

As companies strive to protect employees, technology is playing an increasingly important role in the workplace. In particular, we are seeing the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and bots in helping to protect employees and the general public in innovative ways.

The Role of RPA in Protecting Company Employees

Employee health is a major concern for companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. With weeks, possibly even months, of disruptions to normal work routines and many employees now working from home, many governments are requiring companies to track the health of their employees.

This requires taking each employee’s temperature, checking their travel history and having them fill out a short health survey each morning when they arrive at work.

This is a lot of data to go through on a daily basis, particularly for medium- and large-sized companies. To take current employees away from their regular work or hire new employees to go through this data is a massive drain on resources.

Fortunately, RPA is invaluable when it comes to the collection, organization and analysis of this data. The way RPA works is simple and can benefit localized companies and companies that have offices and teams spread around the globe.

RPA can automate the delivery and collection of the daily health questionnaire for each employee, track which employees have filled out the survey, send reminders to those who haven’t and analyze this information along with the daily temperature readings for each employee.

RPA can quickly and easily collect and analyze the data and organize it into daily reports that are delivered to all levels of management. This saves companies a lot of human hours that would be wasted on the tedious nature of sifting through employee health data and eliminate potential human error during data analysis.

The Role of RPA and Bots in Healthcare

With COVID-19 putting an increasing amount of stress on an already stressed healthcare system, human resources are going to be stretched thinner than ever. Fortunately, there is plenty of room for the automation of routine tasks in healthcare, which can help take the burden off staff during the COVID-19 outbreak and beyond.
Here are some important tasks that can be fully automated to ensure healthcare staff can focus on what really matters – the patients:

Electronic bots will make it possible to streamline online scheduling by taking all the relevant information, compiling it into a report and forwarding it to the person responsible for making the appointment.
RPA will improve the care cycle of all patients by organizing and analyzing all the relevant patient data to increase the chances of an accurate diagnosis. In all situations, including a COVID-19 scenario, this gives doctors more time to provide human care to their patients.
RPA can streamline healthcare workflows, which means better management and coordination of individual cases and the overall care provided to patients. It also means an improved ability to provide remote monitoring of a patient, something that is of critical importance with so many COVID-19 patients in self-quarantine.
RPA makes claims management easier for the healthcare provider by making is easier to input, process and evaluate the data and deal with any appeals that are made.

All of this automation reduces the occurrence of human error, while providing a personalized user experience for patients and increasing employee satisfaction in the workplace.

The Reality

The COVID-19 situation is changing daily and the long-term effects on how we live and work are uncertain in these early days. However, technology has been developed to the point at which it can provide tools to front line workers that will vastly improve our response to this novel infectious disease. This will ultimately help keep employees, as well as customers and the general public, safe in a variety of workplace settings.

Category: RPA Oil

Unattended Versus Attended Bots — Which Ones are Right For Your Business?