Cobotics

You might be wondering why Cobotics is mentioned here as part of the Business Hierarchy of Needs?. In the previous section, we talked about technology’s impact on the design of organizations and business processes. Cobotics significantly impacts that thinking. In this section, I will expand the concept of Cobotics to include Business Process Automation (BPA), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for commonly repeated business processes such as accounts payable, expense reporting, filling in forms, and other mundane tasks.

Cobotics is the application of robots to help people do their jobs, which easily applies to manufacturing and distribution. Robots have evolved to a level where they are capable of handling tasks that are wasted movement to humans. There are many case studies on the benefits of Cobotics and the following are a few examples:

1. Loading and unloading parts into a machine or an assembly line.

2. High strength exoskeleton robots that allow humans to pick up and move very heavy weights reducing the risk of injury.

3. Delicate and sophisticated parts inspection.

4. Highly repetitive assembly.

5. Part presentation to operators.

6. Sorting in recycling facilities.

7. Picking in dense storage applications for distribution centers.

8. Testing lab sample movement and validation.

In these cases, the throughput of the machines and operator productivity was increased by 50% or more. The applications are endless in industries such as fast-food restaurants, grocery, beverage, manufacturing, military, aerospace, and many others. Technology strategies are quickly adopting Cobotics as a basic business need.

Cobotics eliminates routine and repetitive tasks that are a root cause of job dissatisfaction, errors, injuries, and a host of other issues stakeholders face in their jobs. The benefits of Cobotics include but are not limited to:

1. Making processes more efficient and effective.

2. Improved attendance.

3. Reducing costs.

4. Decreasing risk, injury, and employee dissatisfaction.

5. Providing greater accuracy in the handoffs of information between functions through better transparency.

6. Improved customer service.

7. Accelerating Continuous Improvement.

Companies cannot afford to disregard the advantages of Cobotics in their strategic plan and their future state.

Business Process Automation (BPA) is the application of software systems to automate complex cross-functional business processes across multiple information technology systems. Before we go much further, I want to share an example:

Lack of BPA: A customer calls with an order, and the customer service agent writes the order on a form. The form is sent to someone in finance who validates credit and account accuracy and reports back to the agent. The order is sent to the service group, which sits down and plans the resources (purchasing, scheduling, etc.) required to fulfill the order and sends a note back to the customer service agent, who calls the customer with expected fulfillment dates.

Integrated BPA: A customer goes to the company’s portal, enters their order and the system automatically validates credit worthiness and the availability of the product or service; it creates a schedule and reports back to the customer, while allowing the customer to see the status of their order in their portal.

You get the picture. You may also be thinking that this is an expensive proposition, but it does not have to be, because there are multiple platforms in the marketplace that fully automate this process for you. It is necessary that you address this as an operating gap. The truth is that your customers have been spoiled by Amazon, Walmart.com, and other marketplaces and they expect this kind of interaction from you. It applies to all types of businesses but is crucial in both the Business to Business and Business to Consumer marketplaces.

The above example is just one of many BPA applications that include but are not limited to document approval, expense reporting, automating problem solving, enforcing standards and policy, interpreting unstructured data, and decision making. BPA is a significant part of every digital transformation and should be considered for automating standard business processes, which will realize significant cost reductions, improvements in data accuracy, reductions in employee frustration, and reductions in lead times.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the application of simple low-code, rules-based software, machine learning, and AI-based robots (BOTS) to automate basic repetitive work and improve the throughput of common business workflows which are typically non-value-added tasks that negatively impact the overhead costs in a business. Low-code platforms have made the implementation of RPA much easier and effective and do not require the same effort as BPA projects. They are quick win projects that help eliminate shadow systems. In some businesses, large numbers of people do preliminary screening of applications, review credentials, process invoices, consolidate reports, and many other routine business tasks. RPA will typically make recommendations to users on preferred next steps

In a Value Stream Mapping project for two different middle market companies, we found applications for RPA that could eliminate thousands of hours of effort inside the organization, as well as significantly improve the accuracy of the work and data integrity while minimizing the lead time for that effort. The future of RPA is bright, and it is being used for many other applications including sales forecasting, product recommendations, predictive maintenance, fiscal management/planning, and optimizing schedules.

In the competitive marketplace for customers, the drive for better financial performance and required improvements in the Voice of the Customer, technology needs to be an important part of a company’s strategy and Cobotics needs to be part of that thinking.

After reading this section, you should be thinking about:

1. How do we educate ourselves on this emerging set of technologies?

2. Have we looked at the benefits of Cobotics?

3. How much wasted effort exists in the company on routine tasks?

4. Does our technology strategy properly incorporate these benefits?