Difference Between RPA and WLA

Last Updated : 22 Sep, 2023

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Workload Automation (WLA) are both major appliances that are used in businesses to automate processes and tasks. While they perform the same things, there are some key differences between the two, with unique advantages and disadvantages. Both technologies make workflows more efficient, can reduce expenses, reduce the workload of IT staff members, and can automate repetitive processes and schedule tasks.

While dealing with a competitive world with an increasingly complex and dynamic environment of automation, it is sensible to think of workload automation and robotic process automation as complementary tools. When used properly and wisely, WLA & RPA can be used together to make automation strategy more effective and comprehensive. To better understand how they are distinguished from each other and how they are availed, let’s look at each in-depth, exploring some of the benefits that each brings to businesses.

1. Robotic Process Automation:

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation is a software technology that is used to automate digital tasks and mimic human actions. It makes the process easy to perform high volume and repeatable tasks. It works in the same way humans interact with the software. RPA is more than a trend. RPA creates software programs to perform various tasks such as entering data, editing details, logging into applications, doing various calculations, transactions, copying data, etc.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) facilitates organizations to automate work using Artificial Intelligence (Al) & Machine Learning (ML) which are done by human beings across various applications and systems.
RPA gives different ways to think about how business process solutions are delivered & managed with ease.
RPA transfers the process execution from humans to software. These software bots can interact with in-house applications, websites, user portals, etc.
RPA is a software program that runs on end users’ computers, laptops or mobile devices.
RPA is based upon the sequence flow of commands executed by Bots under some defined set of business rules.
RPA can capture human handwriting using optical character recognition, can extract entities like name, address using natural language processing, and also can capture context from images.
RPA helps to utilize the maximum potential of the human brain as it can perform those tasks which require human interaction, logic, vision, judgments.
RPA doesn’t require direct access to the code or the database of the operations as it runs on end users’ pc, laptops or mobile devices.
Above all, RPA reduces human efforts by replacing repetitive and boring clerical tasks with a virtual workflow.

Benefits of RPA:

RPA is cost-effective and helps the business to run in a more efficient manner.
It gives the most accurate results.
The technical barrier is quite low while using RPA.
It meets customers’ expectations and satisfies them with desired outcomes.
It automates time-consuming and recitative processes.
It is used for security purposes as it secures data and protects the organization’s details.
It reduces the workload burden as it mimics human intervention.

2. Workload Automation:

WLA stands for Workload Automation is the process of scheduling the tasks automatically by using the software. It is mainly used to initiate, manage, run, compute and execute business processes, transitions, workflows, and other related tasks. without using human intervention, it works more effectively. There is no fear of human error. Through the use of this automation, we get exact and accurate output as per our requirement within a short period of time.

There is no requirement to use manual scripting and coordinating among multiple systems because it uses a single application to manage workload across physical, virtual, and cloud management. And instead of running multiple instances, WLA provides instant scalability to better handle whatever comes in way of execution plus predictive workload analytics, will be able to visualize complex relationships and proactively monitor critical path thresholds.
Automation is a great way to gain more efficiency and business agility and with HCL WLA can seamlessly orchestrate our business-critical workflow across multiple platforms and applications.
It uses a web-based console that gives a single point of control to administer design and monitor the workload and all can be tracked from a single source.
Customs dashboards are made to show only the workflows needed for each team and using dashboards we can directly reach to the problem and resolve it in a few steps as well as we can check the error and determine what the issue is to fix it so as to keep the workflows on track.
It enhances the built-in analytics to minimize the impact of disruption. This will help to meet SLA and business continuity needs for planned and unplanned outages.
It allows us quickly to see if our critical workload will complete on time and even be the critical path, it can use event triggering notification and automatically open an incident ticket or submit recovery workflow as per the needs.

Benefits of WLA:

WLA increases efficiency due to being more focused on real-time processing than time-based processing.
It reduces turnaround time for workflow because it takes very less time top WLA predicts the impact of changes and implements accordingly.
WLA simplifies the complex processes and provides easy to final output.
It can spot and fix problems in the workloads before they happen.
It improves decision-making and is cost-effective.
It increases productivity regardless of dynamic workloads.
Processes any request and gives fast service.
WLA reduces errors as it is completely software-based and doesn’t use any manual or human involvement.