Alphalake Ai has long championed a Hybrid Automation Method™ made possible by the interoperability of our technology partners. 

"Traditional RPA vendors are beginning to catch on to the benefits of the no-code API connector-based approach that I was taught by Markus and the team at Workato, and that Alphalake Ai has advocated for a while now." —  Olly Cogan, Founder & CEO of Alphalake Ai

We get to see first-hand how much easier it makes life for our customers who have access to this capability. So, with each successful project, we become even stronger champions of the hybrid automation cause.

The slide below shows which functions are best performed by the different methods of process automation: 

Switching between these is made much easier thanks to the direct "iPaaS / LCAP" and "RPA" integration that exists between these two platforms, allowing automated workflows to call on the best method as and when required to perform a certain job.

Why API-based automation is the ideal foundation

Workato sees integration and automation as the same thing. Once the integration has been made possible, you can create triggers. For example, once an email address has been added, it can trigger an action in another system that sends out a welcome message or appointment reminder. Rather than having to write code to connect these actions, Workato allows you to achieve it through drag-and-drop recipes. 

All you need to understand is the process you want to streamline, and through this one platform, you can connect as many systems as you need, creating automation without the need to bring in a new coding team for each system integration. 

How RPA can make API-based automation even more effective

As powerful as this no-code drag-and-drop API connector approach is, there are still many circumstances in current business settings and system environments where being able to call upon RPA from within a Low Code Application Platform (LCAP) or Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), such as Workato, brings a great deal of benefits. Indeed, this approach helps us ensure that elegant and efficient digital automation is simple to design and build and will run robustly through two fully supported platforms, with no bespoke code.

Alphalake AI recommends this RPA-API bridge as part of our Hybrid Automation Method™. It allows you to automate at a software level with platforms like Workato and then seamlessly integrate the screen-based approach of RPA when you don’t have access to an API or the API is limited. Any process a user can do, a software bot can learn too, making UiPath a powerful ally for Workato. 

Before this partnership, if a process being handled by API-based automation needed to trigger an action from an RPA bot, you would have to program a solution to connect the two. With plenty of legacy software being used in all industries, from logistics to healthcare, the need to bounce from one form of automation to the other is common.  

The UiPath-Workato connector cuts out the programming demands, allowing those of us who don’t have coding experience to integrate UiPath’s RPA into our workflow recipes in Workato. When you come across elements of a workflow that aren’t API-friendly, you can simply pull the UiPath connector into the recipe. This will initiate the bot, which will do its thing and then loop back into the workflow in Workato, triggering any subsequent actions in the recipe. 

Why a hybrid approach is the ideal automation recipe (for now)

To drive the best results for our clients, the Alphalake Ai approach is to harness Workato's speed and the ease of its no-code API recipe builder and combine this with RPA whenever it is present or needed. For easy and dependable switching between the two, without the need for any programming, the Uipath plugin comes very much in handy.

If you'd like to know more about the Cerner and Epic Connectors that Alphalake has published on the Workato community, we'll be providing some demos over the coming weeks and will share more here. We will also be discussing building No-Code Connectors for other APIs to help power up more platforms.

If you’re curious about using Workato and UiPath as automation tools or have questions regarding Alphalake’s Hybrid Automation Method™, please feel free to contact a member of the Alphalake team who will be more than happy to help you.