WHAT IS A BOT? The digital workforce that will be joining your team

What is the purpose of a “bot”?

Digital transformation is a huge wave sweeping the business world, where companies are using cutting edge technologies to modify themselves, upgrade existing processes and create new ones, to increase speed and accuracy of service, make huge cost savings, and improve customer experience.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is arguably the backbone of this, as it’s one of the easiest technologies to set up, it's just so powerful it can transform teams in a matter of months. With this software, developers can create automated processes that use the User Interface to click and type, as if it were using a mouse and keyboard. These “virtual workers” are called Software Robots or “Bots” and are extremely versatile.

Building “bots” with RPA is like giving your staff teams virtual assistants to automate repetitive, menial, manually intensive tasks so that your staff can focus on more intellectual, creative, and value-adding tasks. If you’ve not heard of RPA before, hopefully after reading this you will start to appreciate the massive potential and the impact this technology can have on you, your business, and your work life.

These digital workers don’t have intelligence, but they can do all the odd jobs around the business that don’t require any human judgment. Bots aren’t limited to small straightforward processes either. Bots can handle huge end-to-end processes as long as the process has logical, rules-based decision points, the input data that the bot uses is standardized (Bots can only understand pre-determined data rather than free text), and the process and applications the Bot uses are stable (Bots can’t handle constantly changing applications or webpage layouts).

For example, a robot can easily fill out a form using data from an excel spreadsheet, but it can't make a decision from instructions in an email. However, if you mixed RPA with Artificial intelligence capabilities (this is called Intelligent Automation), then automation can do so much more

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A Bot is able to save your team hours of time and staff effort, as it can work to assist staff, can work behind the scenes, or can work overnight. Using bots to automate processes can also reduce human errors, improve compliance, and even track workloads to provide more accurate performance insights and Management Information (MI).

How does a Bot work?

For a bot to work, you have to map the step-by-step actions and decisions that you want the robot to do. Defining exactly what link or button to click and where and what to type, and you need to logically define how the Bot needs to make a decision. For example, if the bot needs to process a customer’s details differently depending on whether they are married or not, the decision would need to be defined as:

IF the customer is married send form A

ELSE IF the customer is not married send form B

For the Bot to follow these steps the developer would drag-and-drop these actions and decision points onto the RPA application's “studio”. The Bot will also need to know how many cases it needs to work on so that it can loop through the steps repeatedly before it is finished

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These images above show you what an automated process looks like in RPA studio for different software platforms. The two main layouts are drag-and-drop shapes (like in Blue Prism and UiPath), or drag-and-drop lines (like Automation Anywhere and IBM RPA). I, and most other developers I’ve spoken to prefer the graphical layout with shapes, as it’s so much easier to understand, especially when editing someone else’s work.

Once built, you can press play and watch the Bot go step-by-step, looping through your process until it's finished. When watching a Bot at work, it’s like an invisible pair of hands opening applications and websites on your desktop, logging in, typing in text fields and clicking on buttons on your screen, and even pulling data from multiple places to compile it into a central location like in an Excel spreadsheet.

?Check out bot in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HNnAXHQ6LI&t=360s

In reality, automation activities typically work in the background, so even if you had it running on your computer you would hardly see what it is doing. To reduce costs further by outsourcing infrastructure, most robots now operate in the cloud away from human view

How can I build one

The method of building a simple Bot is really quite straightforward. To get started with building your own automated robot, visit your chosen RPA software platform and download a free edition:

UiPath: https://cloud.uipath.com/portal_/register

Blue Prism: https://www.blueprism.com/free-trial/?

Automation Anywhere:?https://www.automationanywhere.com/products/enterprise/community-edition

Once you’ve launched the RPA studio, you essentially do just a handful of things:

1.?????Drag and drop different steps into your process map

2.?????Configure for each step to tell the bot exactly what each step does.?E.g., how to access the website, where to find a certain element on a webpage, what button to click on or where to locate an excel file

3.?????Add a loop so that the Bot can repeat the process to complete a list of work

4.?????Define the trigger. Will this process start at 09.00 am every day, or will an action trigger the process, like when the Bot receives an email from a specific email address?

RPA development is as simple as it sounds (for less complex processes), through RPA can handle extremely complex processes as well. And RPA software companies are making development even easier and more intuitive as they head towards what many RPA execs are calling “Citizen development”, where eventually any person in the office will be able to build automated processes themselves without relying on RPA developers.

There is a lot of training online if staff wanted to start developing automation, and as a result, anyone will be able to do it. This inevitably will cause a lot of issues in the near future, as automation is way too powerful for teams of staff to start building without some sort of governance and control. It is good to empower staff, however, bots need to be developed and tested correctly before they are launched, otherwise, they could wreak total havoc all across your business, doing things that the creators didn’t intend, or the work they were supposed to do isn’t done at all.

‘With great power, comes great responsibility’ to do things right so if you want to learn more about governance, running projects well and other topics on Intelligent Automation in your office, subscribe to my YouTube channel Tony IA (Intelligent Automation, Simplified) for videos created weekly

My aim is to simplify intelligent automation for business leaders and professionals who are new to automation to level up their knowledge. Learn how to optimise your business and discover new technologies, in a lean and accelerated way.

You can also learn more from my book, Business @ the Speed of Bots: The AEIO YOU method HOW TO IMPLEMENT ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION THAT SCALES. Get ready for the new digital transformation age for more information. The foreword is written by Guy Kirkwood, who is the ex-chief evangelist of UiPath, and a very well-known advocate of RPA with over 20 years of experience in outsourcing.

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