Does RPA really work?

As I used to do before answering such BIG questions, to give introduction to make my answer more acceptable, logical and reasonable one without any praise or biases so I will mention some real experiences that formed my convictions through delivering hundreds of successful RPA projects in 12 countries for different business sectors such Telecom, banks and healthcare, but today I will focus on few experiences that will help to answer the question and also to avoid RPA projects failure.

 While delivering one of my projects for one of the telecom operators in Middle East (ME), some of the end users complained about the performance of Customer Relation Management (CRM) application claiming that the automation tool negatively affected the CRM performance leading to several crashes which triggered several discussions and meetings which all led me to an obvious conclusion about that application when we slow down the automation steps navigating between the CRM pages the automation works fine and the more we accelerate the automation the crashes increase, the application owners did not even want to discuss the idea as it would require them to work on the system and they preferred to defend themselves and blaming the RPA on something they know it was originally there and RPA just helped to reveal it.

Another experience while delivering another project for another client in ME, we noticed that the automation works perfectly fine at the beginning and then after few hours the performance regresses over time till it reaches frozen state and also this situation led me to fully analyze the application performance till I reached a conclusion that the underlying application had a memory leak that cause the application to keep accumulating the data in the memory heap till it reaches the memory limits and the application frozen, also the issue was there even before the automation but the automation tool just revealed it.

Before using those two experiences to answer the question I just want to emphasize on the definition of Robotic process Automation using its three words Robotic as a predefined rules that will be executed on the applications at the desktop level, Process as a set of steps to be followed to achieve a goal and Automation as an automatic actions executions mimicking the users mouse clicks and keyboard strokes.

Based on the two examples I mentioned and several others It became obvious to me that the legacy GUI and systems were not built to be used by BOTs but by human beings who interacting slower than robots sending less post-back requests to the back-end servers but when BOTs appeared and became a need for business, it performs actions faster and in some situations reveals previously existing applications issues that must be considered and tackled while designing the RPA solution to ensure successful deliverables that’s why one of the most important phases in any project is the technical and business discovery phase.

There are several other reasons that cause RPA projects failure such as the used RPA tool, the RPA team technical and business knowledge, selecting the right processes, the level of analysis you conduct before automation and several other reasons that can be easily avoided if you have the right service integrator, tool, team, leader and collaboration between all stakeholders.

Based on the RPA definition and years of hands-on experience, the tools will never affect the underlying applications performance but it will reveal several bugs which were there but neglected and the RPA vendors are requested to design a solutions to overcome those bugs, deliver the desired results and report those issues to whoever concerned.

In a summary RPA proofed that it worked, is working and will be working delivering great business value even if it will need to cooperate with several complementary technologies to deliver the new RPA generation the Intelligent Automation as one of the key pillars of the digital transformation the main business recovery plan.

Overcoming all changes, It worked for me hundreds of times, does it work for you?