Human Assistants - Get more done..

While automation helps in simplifying the tasks for the business and do them more efficiently and effectively – what is important for customers is to have a modular and scalable model – which provides you the flexibility and resilience to build and manage with ease, develop faster and provide high performance and high ROI.

Automation for a while has been labelled, though incorrectly, to eat up human jobs but the fact we tend to ignore is that how can we make the automation as a means to improve efficiency within the organization, amongst the employees, in their day-to-day tasks. How can we make it add to the top-line as well as the bottom line. How can these bots work in tandem with the human workforce to increase their output and efficiency, take away the monotonous work from their daily lives, how to reduce errors and improve the accuracy of the work they are doing, improve the turn around time.

That is where the importance of Attended Automation gains importance in any business – whatever function you are in and across different industries there are huge efficiencies that can be gained by automating the day to day tasks, which are non-value adding. While the bots would execute the tasks working across multiple applications – the humans can play a role in the decision-making tasks - like approvals, escalations, and exceptions. UiPath Action Center makes it easy and efficient to hand off the process from the bots to the humans and back again. The seamless integration and hand-off is key to the success. Forget sifting through hundreds of emails—Action Center gives users a central portal where they can see all their tasks and supporting documents, take actions, and pass the job back to a robot right then and there. Even from their mobile device. If you already use external tools like Business Process Management software to handle part of a process, simply use our APIs to connect them with Action Center. Manage document exceptions easily with UiPath Validation Station integration.

Attended automation is the flavor of the season – where organizations are in discussion with us to implement automation for their workforce. While most of the attended automations make the computer busy for the bot and practically non-usable for the agent, UiPath Picture-in-Picture feature allows the agents / employee to continue working while the bot is also running. This was the deal breaking feature at one of the customers who had thousands of agents booking flights for their customers, the bot was collating data from multiple sites and applications to give a consolidated view to the agent – who could offer the right price to their customers, on the dates and schedules they wanted. Considering the fact that the flight booking was the core business for the organization and that would define their topline as well as bottom line (giving the lowest cost, and highest profit margin to the organization), it made a lot of sense for the customer to choose UiPath.

Our robots can pause and resume work, drop off work to another person / bot, and efficiently keep busy with another task until it’s time to pick the job back up. The automations are built for scalability, resilience, inter-operability and flexibility.

One of the concepts which is becoming very popular today in the Hyperautomation world is the Citizen development model – a bot of every person, a bot which works as a digital assistant for the resources. For this the organizations need to democratize automation – give the freedom to the employees to develop their automations – of course with some governance / balances and checks built into it. To enable this, while the attended bots are there to do the automation, the organization needs to develop the processes at scale – for which we have launched the Studio X (developer) which is an easy to use to tool to develop the workflow. Having a drag-and-drop functionality, without any coding or minimal technical knowledge, that lets you easily build robots that can handle the start-and-stop, come-and-go of human interactions. Studio X workflows can be further scaled up for an enterprise deployment as well thus helping in reducing the workload of the CoE team.

The power of a bot for every person can help organizations save a lot of dollars – even at a productivity improvement of 20 minutes which gets translated into few thousand dollars per person per year. If the same gets translated for the employees across the organization – say a 1000 employees, you can imagine how a 20 min saving per employee can translate into Millions of dollars.

Driving this initiative is something which can be a big challenge given the fact that it would involve a lot of time to plan for it, change management amongst the organization to train them, hand hold them and a support infrastructure to make sure the plan is executed properly. It has to be implemented in a phased manner and with the right set of people where it will have the maximum impact and add a lot of value. Automation is not just a software but a way of working in tandem with a virtual colleague and to help you in adding to the top line as well as the bottom line. 

https://www.uipath.com/rpa/robot-every-person