Bob The Bot is Broken And You Can’t Figure Out Why

Do you remember that famous commercial where this nice old lady yells "I've fallen and I can't get up!"? Well, the Gen1 RPA version of that commercial would be something like this "I've broken down and I don't know why?"

Broken bots and brittle bots are essentially the poster child for what's wrong with Gen1 RPA vendors. I can tell you that automation teams that are running Gen1 RPA almost always bring up their broken and brittle issues when asked what pains you about your current RPA provider?

The simplistic definition of a broken bot is the inability to quickly identify and solve errors where and when they occur. It ultimately comes down to Gen1 RPA vendors being unable to pinpoint problems, and that my friends is the real problem.

It's shocking to me that Gen1 RPA vendors walked away from trying to solve broken and brittle bot problems with a real-time log system.

Time and time again I've heard “The bot broke and I don't know why!”? Another one of my favorites is “The bot that worked yesterday, doesn't work today and I swear nothing has changed!”?

Can you imagine how frustrating it is to have something work on Monday, but decide to take Taco Tuesday off. But my all-time favorite comment about Gen1 RPA is “Locating a broken bot is like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

“Frustrated” is the most popular word used by developers and citizen developers when asked about broken and brittle bots issues.

What makes broken bot issues so impactful is the time and resources that developer teams need to hunt for the proverbial?needle in the haystack, day after day. Most teams who run Gen1 RPA dedicate around 25% of their resources just to solving broken bot issues every month. Talk about a staggering waste of time.

The reality is solving broken bots with Gen1 RPA takes significant time away from teams doing what they need to do, which is to develop more automations that can save their company significant resources which normally leads to both a decrease in expenses and additional revenue generated by improved processes.

The Cure To The Broken Bot Syndrome Lives In Real-Time Access to Logs

Gen2 RPA hits the mark by solving the Broken Bot Syndrome by providing developers and automation teams full control of robot actions, including access to detailed real-time logs. The result is automation teams are now able to quickly use detailed logs to immediately identify where and why an error occurred, which leads too fast fixes of broken bots.

Let's face it, regardless of how you define it, bots are going to break, and that's just a fact of life. What separates the good from the bad is having a best-in-class Gen2 RPA platform that provides developers and citizen developers with all the tools they need to quickly identify errors, make changes, and as Emeril Lagasse would say "bam" redeploy.

Final Thoughts

The reality is we've all heard those broken bot horror stories, but with Gen2 RPA those stories turn into a distant memory. Now if I had the opportunity to sit down and interview Yoda about Gen1 RPA I'm guessing he would respond with "The greatest teacher, failure is."