There are many jobs that we do on a day-to-day basis that are repetitive. We may not realize it, but many knowledge workers today are performing tasks that are tedious, routine, and monotonous. Perhaps some of the following tasks may sound familiar to you:
- Visiting a variety of websites to download reports. Followed by extracting information from each report and compiling the data into a spreadsheet for further analysis, reporting, and then emailing the consolidated report to your manager.
- Checking your email for alerts and notifications. Reading the email and if it says act on this, you go to another system to key in an order or perform a transaction. Rinse and repeat for the remaining 100 emails in the inbox.
- Downloading a report from a central dashboard and comparing the thousands of rows in the Excel with that of a master copy for discrepancies.
- Basic data entry—entering rows and rows of data into a system.
The good news is, most of these tasks can be done reliably and repeatably by a software robot.
Identifying a process that is suitable for automation may turn out to be more of an art than science. While robots can be trained to perform just about any software-related job, not everything is suited for RPA.
The ideal process for RPA is one that has the following characteristics:
- No abstract decision making: The robot is going to do exactly what you tell it to do. Therefore, whatever process that you decide to automate, it's got to work the same way over and over again. If you program it to purchase a chocolate cake with cherries on the top, it's going to do that each time it runs. It's not going to suddenly decide that the weather has been hot lately and that the client may want a chocolate sundae instead (unless you tell it to).
- Requires no human intervention: The moment that you need a human to perform steps within the process, chances are, you won't be able to automate it fully. Some examples of this include steps that require a wet-ink signature or read off a physical token. You still can automate processes that have human elements in them, just not completely (also known as assisted automation).
- Repeatable: The robot is going to take the same series of steps each time it runs. Given the same inputs, the process will deliver the same outputs. While you can put a certain amount of rules into the flow, the results have to be predictable and repeatable for the robot to function correctly.
- Takes up a considerable amount of time to run manually: Getting the robot to run a process that takes five minutes to complete daily equates to more time savings than that of a process that takes five minutes to run annually. Go for the processes that yield higher time savings.
- Interacts with systems that do not get updated unexpectedly: One of the greatest strengths of robots is their ability to work with most applications, even legacy types. They can read screens, write to text boxes, and click most types of buttons. However, the training the robot receives to perform these actions is only good if the screen that it was trained to understand does not change. Should, for example, the application owner decide to introduce a new mandatory field to the form, the robot will have to be re-trained to understand the new field. Therefore, choose processes that work with applications that are not prone to changes. Ideally, one that you can anticipate the changes when it gets updated (which is easy to do if you or your organization is the owner) so that you have ample time to re-train the robot. Applications that are owned by others, like those on the internet, may change at will, and cause your process to go awry unexpectedly.
- Requires accuracy, especially when performing data-entry: Humans tend to make typos when keying data. If you have worked with any forms that deal with money, you would know that simply moving a decimal place in a number can be fatal. Even misspelling an address or postal code can result in a missing shipment and a bad customer experience. Robots will not make these types of mistakes, and therefore can be trusted with processes that require a high level of accuracy in data-entry.
- Timeliness is important: Robots can be tasked to look for emails or read a database 24x7. That means the moment an order comes in, even in the wee hours of the night, the robot can process it rather than waiting for a human to report to work the next day to do the job.
As with any project, employing a robot to take over a human process has various other soft points to consider, in addition to the ones above. For example, the willingness of the process owner to embrace change, budget and funding, whether or not the bosses are all aligned with the vision, and so on. Or you might just dive into automating the simplest process first, even if at first it doesn't give the biggest savings. At the end of the day, robots will keep the savings going and going. As long as the process is relevant, and the robot is working, the numbers will keep adding up. The work and value that the robot gives back to the organization will grow cumulatively.
