Intelligent Automation Has Changed My Life

6 years ago, I managed a critical customer-facing process. We were processing hundreds of thousands of customers each month. There were numerous controls, dashboards, and internal audits in place to ensure that we met our customer and regulator needs. All of these checks were manually performed by a human (me) and required about 30 hours per week. Of course, the monitoring found exceptions that were manually remediated (also by me) and this consumed about another 25 hours per week.

I was unhappy and wasn't using my talent to improve the customer experience or make the process run more smoothly. So, I went to work on automating as many of the manual efforts as possible. I had to get creative with the tools that I had; Microsoft Excel, SQL, and an extra laptop. Over time, I was able to greatly reduce the manual overhead in my role. There was now time for additional duties that were more fulfilling. My happiness increased, as did the quality of the process.

However, I was still the human-in-the-loop and a few days off would create an avalanche of work that would take weeks to unbury myself out of. I dreaded coming into work after a week off! The process was better than when I left it, however, it wasn't enough; a human was still the engine of the process. With the additional time that I had created, I started searching for an enterprise-grade solution that would move me into the driver's seat of my process.

It was around this time that I discovered Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which was the ideal solution for the process that spanned multiple enterprise systems that didn't talk to each other. I asked to join the team building the automation platform to learn the no-code technology. After several weeks, I was creating bots that were much more sustainable and powerful than the VB macros running on the extra laptop. There was so much excitement for how no-code development could be learned and deployed so quickly.

Since then I have become an evangelist for no-code technology and intelligent process automation. Working together with the business, we have been able to automate hundreds of thousands of hours of manual process work. This has resulted in significant cost savings. More importantly, it has allowed hundreds of people to move to the driver's seat of their businesses, leverage their best talents, and find more fulfilling work.