Everybody knows what a bot is when it comes to RPA. However, many still struggle to understand what's the difference between an attended and unattended solution.
Attended
Essentially, an Attended bot helps users to execute small and repetitive tasks such as checking system availability, fulfilling forms, data entry, and so on. They are triggered by the user itself when he or she needs that specific task to be executed.
Let's pause for a moment and think of a real-world scenario. Imagine a service desk analyst that receives daily requests to unlock users from a specific system. The process is simple as shown in the following steps.
The support ticket is received with the locked user.
The analyst copies the ID and opens the application to unlock the user.
The analyst has to navigates between a couple of pages to get to the correct place.
He or she will fill out a form, confirm the ID, and submit the request to unlock.
Once the confirmation is received, the analyst will go back to the ticket and close it.
The whole process isn't complex, yet, it takes around 5 minutes. In a small company, this might not be an issue. However, it could be a real challenge for medium to big companies. Now, let's take a look at the TO-BE process with an attended bot.
The support ticket is received with the locked user.
The analyst triggers the attended bot that gets the ID from the ticket.
The bot opens the application and navigates straight to the required page.
It will automatically fill out a form, confirm the ID, and submit the request to unlock.
It will wait for the confirmation and once is received, it will go back to the ticket and close it.
The whole process looks very similar, however, the automated version is much faster and more reliable. Bots are less likely to make mistakes or forget steps. They will execute the same steps over and over again.
Unattended
On the other, unattended bots are meant to run without any human interaction, they are supposed to be more complex workflows that are going to run for a longer period of time. They aren't dependent on human triggers, instead, they are controlled by UiPath Orchestrator. Usually, they run on dedicated machines connected to Orchestrator.
Now, let's suppose your company has to send out many Invoices to its customers every day, and it's very time-consuming for the team to process all of them. The unattended bot would be running multiple times per day, and in each run would retrieve all the approved invoices. For each invoice detail, it would create a file (based on a template) inserting the dynamic details. Once the file is ready, it would send out to the customers via email, and then update the internal system as "Complete".
The automated process would be much more efficient and reliable. It could run 24/7 attending teams across the globe.
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