How much work can a RPA bot do?
This is a common question in all the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) discussions and also the most confusing too. The claimed numbers range from 1 to 9 Full-Time Employee (FTE). So let's try to answer this tricky question simply and logically, shall we?
Base Calculation
Let's assume that the developed RPA bot is going to operate at the same speed as that of human associate. The bot is capable of running 24x7 which is equivalent to 3 human work shifts in business operation terms. Hence a single bot can do the work equivalent to 3 FTE manual effort, thus the bot's work capacity is equivalent to 3 FTE manual effort.
Further Extension Logic
From various implementation case studies, we know RPA generally operates at a faster speed than a human. If the process being automated has extensive manual activities such as typing data into applications and validation of various data points, this difference in processing speed will be more evident. Hence this FTE number generally ends up being more than 3 FTE.
Final Note
Using this logic, we can estimate the bot's capacity to an approximate extent. However, the actual process throughput after automation will depend on various other factors such as the type of data formats being handled, the process flow structure, the nature of backend applications, etc. This can arrive only after an in-depth analysis of the process itself. This could be used to arrive at a more accurate per-bot capacity.
If you have a different approach to the same, please comment below.
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8 年There are two other SIGNIFICANT factors that impact the performance of a robot 1. whether it can avoid pauses/sleeps 2. whether it can run automations in parallel (multiple threads) on the same CPU. RPA technologies that use mostly (or 100%) event driven architecture are capable of avoiding sleeps and pauses altogether and also, can update multiple applications simultaneously on different threads, on the same CPU. So, as you point out, there's a 24x7 and there's speed v a human but one big thing a human cannot do, is enter into two keyboards at once (that would be funny). However a robot can do limitless keyboard / UI interactions in parallel. A recent customer upgraded from 1 RPA vendor to another recently (actually to Pega) and the Robots ran 4 times faster than their fastest, and that was with no tweaking! The application performance you mention starts to become less of a factor too with multi-threading. Lets say the robots needs to interact with data from 4 screens from the slowest applications and even the fastest Robot does that in 20 seconds. During those 20 seconds, the RPA technology that supports multi-threading can do another 20 seconds work at the same time - and that soon adds up. I've seen 1 robot do the work of 30 people! There's a lot more to this but net net, RPA technology vendors are different but those that cannot perform at lightening speed, nor run attended on the desktop super-fast, fall away very quickly with proof of concepts include these comparisons. Give me a buzz and I can show you what parallel threading looks like in a Robot - it's very cool :)