The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of the Robotic Process Automation
Federico Navarrete ??
???? Technovator, ?? Author and ?? Speaker, Leading People & Innovations ?? | Cultural Intelligence Expert | Follow me at #BeAnAgentOfChange
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a growing and evolving topic for the last 5 years. Many organizations are investing a considerable amount of time and money to automate repetitive and potentially repetitive tasks. These platforms are extremely hot in the market and can bring multiple benefits, e.g:
And many more.?One of their greatest parts is that they are known?by CUSEC:
Definitely, all these great points create an outstanding first impression. It sounds like love at first sight. The RPAs are commonly sold as virtual employees that can work 24/7/365 without bonuses or lunch breaks! Following all predefined rules from their organizations. Managers, CEOs, and CTOs can visualize massive earnings and how many FTEs (Full-Time employees) are going to be saved per quarter.
Nevertheless, like love at first sight, it can be tricky and result in lamentable divorces. These unfortunate situations happen when one party did not understand the other in-depth.?And most importantly, when they couldn't figure out how to use their new skill set to level themselves up!
Based on my last two years of experience designing and building bots. I have identified the Good, the Bad, and potentially, the Ugly parts of implementing RPAs. However, more than giving you the not-so-good parts of them. I'd like to share with you my advice and help you level up your opportunities, empowering yourself with this hot and emerging technology.
The Good
The Good Parts of the RPAs happen when they are properly implemented. These new robots can become real Change Agents in your organizations. They are capable of creating disruptive innovations and forging stronger relations among your employees, clients, and employers.
This can be a bit tricky -in my experience- because most of the time, they need additional work to extend the honeymoons as long as possible. To create ideal and stable marriages.
From my perspective, I have identified the following opportunities in the RPA world.
1. Minimize repetitive tasks
How many times have you performed repetitive tasks at work?
I'm sure you perform them all the time and you're tired of them! And even an example of these boring tasks is this one (Figure 1):
Figure 1. A daily repetitive task.
Many people for sure face similar tasks like the one above. This one is a perfect example of a process for an RPA implementation. Since all processes are known and repetitive. And for sure, if you implement it fine. This situation will reduce stress, loss of money, resources, energy, etc.
The RPAs as I expressed before, are seen as virtual employees since they can work 24/7/365 without food, water, or asking for increments in their salaries! They can take care of these tedious tasks that no one wants to do, help companies standardize their processes, and minimize human errors.
There are mainly two kinds of robots:
2. Increase ROI
This is one of the crucial parts of implementing the RPAs. Since companies are capable of increasing their revenues by reducing their FTEs to the minimum, reducing human errors, providing faster answers and better communication with their clients, etc.
On the other hand, properly re-skilled employees can become real deal-breakers. Since they will move to new, more creative, and intellectual positions. They would put into practice their previous and new knowledge (Power BI, Data Analysis, etc.) from all these manual tasks that would be automated. These new opportunities would be more intellectual and tend to be better paid [1].
3. New job opportunities
After companies have properly implemented the RPAs and refocused their efforts on their core businesses. New jobs would come as compensation for the previous positions, for example, AI business development manager, Cybercity analyst, and Quantum machine-learning analyst, among many others [2].
The RPAs can be seen as kinds of tiny BPOs inside the organizations. Since they take care of these tasks that could have been delegated to 3rd party companies from the comfort of their own home. They allow companies to focus one more time on their core businesses.
The Bad
The Bad Parts of the RPAs are mostly connected to inexperienced or assigning improper employees to manage or create the robots.
Some time ago, I received a job offer from a recruiter, who needed an RPA developer. Unfortunately, he was unaware of what a common developer is [3]. The offer was approximately the following one:
I have a new position in Cracow. One of the best ones in the Polish market for RPAs.
My client, a Swiss bank is looking forward to an RPA developer who has amazing soft-skills and is super skillful in programming.
Also, he can identify potential automation opportunities and innovations, share his knowledge, interact with clients, program in Automation Anywhere, VB.NET, C#, VBA, SQL Server, ASP.NET, JavaScript, etc.
The offer was for an entry-level position and you rarely have the best of both worlds. Generally, developers only follow specific tasks and hardly ever interact with clients for various reasons [4].
Returning to the bad parts. I have been able to identify three specific scenarios where the RPAs became complicated relationships and the ending of the honeymoons … Well, they finished in lamentable divorces. These cases are the following ones:
1. Treat RPAs as if they don't require any programming skill
This is the most common misconception, but relatively easy to tackle.
Since Low-Code Platforms are becoming popular, some people think that RPAs are No-Code tools. You just need to configure them once, have minimal infrastructure changes and they would start mimicking all your PC interactions in a blink of an eye!
Unfortunately, that isn't what frequently happens. To be frank, I'd really love it if it will be like that and have these kinds of tools because I could take some breaks at work!
Nevertheless, let's be serious. To properly build a robot, you need to:
Among many other things. No RPA solution until today is capable of auto-predicting human behaviors without any support. Sooner or later, manual adjustments are needed and they can only be done by programmers (in March 2019). The RPAs cannot auto-add these exceptions by themselves. Especially, if the exceptions are uncommon or poorly documented. For example, a drastic UI change from the login page (Figure 2).
Figure 2. First Facebook Login (2004) vs Current Facebook Login (Mar 2019).
Figure 1 can be easily understood by a human. However, an RPA is not necessarily the case. I know only one platform, UiPath (its AI Computer Vision library) that could potentially do the trick (from Feb 2019). Nevertheless, it involves extra steps, knowledge, and modifications to the bot, to make it so flexible to accept these drastic changes.
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2. Believe that RPA projects are typical Software development projects
This is the second most common scenario and the most complex to overcome. Many organizations including the ones that have their own IT departments make this mistake easily and frequently.
They send all their managers and programmers to learn about certain RPAs. The teams get many certificates, but when the moments of truth happen … There are delays and delays and delays, no proper understanding of the tools, confusion in understanding the business cases, etc.
The RPA projects (as explained in the Business Analyst Training of UiPath) are slightly different. They can be simplified as in the next points.
Furthermore, I have experienced and heard stories from multiple organizations, where some of their most experienced managers led these projects mostly with mixed results.
Despite this, they were vastly trained and had long careers, leading typical software development teams. They didn't have any practical experience or understand properly the RPAs. The limitations of the RPAs were complex to believe for them. This led to the that from time to time, they weren't open to listening to any of these "excuses" that something was impossible to be done. And all this created a concrete risk:
They still treated the RPAs as typical software development projects.
The management and work became stressful and ineffective. Rarely, reaching deadlines because they closed their minds and didn't want to see how they differ, adopt new techniques [6], or best practices [7], or identify potential employees, who might be interested in the technologies. Ultimately, they pressured their programmers to reskill RPA to reach their targets at any cost.
Reskilling and awareness in this emerging market are key points. Both sides, management, and IT departments need to understand their new roles since the projects are similar, but as my brother always says:
"Similar is not alike" (Parecido no es igual). Rodrigo Navarrete
3. Think that all processes are suitable for the RPAs
This one was explained in-depth in my previous article (updated) [8], but I'll recap a bit.
A lack of proper understanding of the RPAs' capabilities or processes can create challenging situations. Not all processes are suitable for the RPAs even if you could automate an extremely complex solution from SAP with UiPath. It doesn't mean it's the best or optimal solution. For example, UiPath is quite efficient with SAP, but its training suggests: "To enable SAP Scripting for the best results".
The previous situation won't be highly accurate and is prone to many errors. A VBA Macro would be a more stable, reliable, faster, and effective solution in the long term.
If you actually needed to enable SAP Scripting for the best results, you could also record the VBScript in SAP, edit it, and run it flawlessly since the code was even provided by the tool itself.
The Ugly
The Ugly Parts of the RPAs are connected to deeper changes that could affect societies and workplaces.
They are mostly theoretical cases from my personal experience and background. Nevertheless, they can happen if there is no proper awareness and reskilling programs are run in their workplaces. If you avoid them, you would face frequent situations like this one:
What would you do if an old lady refuses to give you her knowledge because she'll become jobless?
I got that question in a job interview in 2018. Such cases frequently happen, when improper RPA implantations took place. Employees could become reluctant to collaborate with their employers and in some cases, they just quit their companies.
As a Salvadoran, I was able to identify some drastic situations that might happen if these tools were brought in an unsuitable way to certain areas (mostly to emerging or developing countries).
1. A greater gap between the rich and poor
If the workers are only released from their current jobs without any opportunities or new knowledge. This situation will lead to massive discrepancies as used to be 200 years ago between nobles and peasants (Chart 1).
Chart 1. World population living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015 [9].
2. Increase informal employment
Since people wouldn't have formal choices due to the digital skills gap [10]. These technologies could affect their lives drastically. In some cases,?reaching points of no return. Until today, every citizen still needs to find opportunities to feed their kids, pay taxes, bills, rent, etc.
Not all societies are like European ones where they have laws that protect them. In Latin America, e.g., employers would force their employees to give their knowledge and be fired after it without any alternatives.
Additionally, unbelievable numbers of people live in Latin America from informal employment reaching frightful levels as high as 56% in El Salvador in 2016 [11]. This situation could lead to bigger problems, for instance, increase their crime rates [12].
3. Massive movements of people
Recently, massive groups of people from the Middle East, Africa, and Central America have been moving to more developed nations. To increase their standards of living, give better opportunities to their families or just get better jobs [13].
These situations could become more frequent if no reskilling happens when too many processes were automated. The lack of proper laws, and cultural differences, among other reasons, might impact negatively their ways of living and force them to relocate, creating new economic migrants.
As you could have read, the RPAs are capable of providing you with great opportunities and benefits to your organizations. Nevertheless, they could create certain risks to take into consideration before implementing them.
The key in my opinion to successful automations resides in three important points (ARE):
I encourage you to go in-depth into these emerging technologies. You can use them wisely for your own profit, analyze their pros and cons, and understand:
You can Automate Responsibly in your organization.
And if you have any questions, tips, or tricks feel free to leave them in the comments or if you want more in-depth advice on how to get started, you can reach me at:
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