The robots have arrived to do your work
Last week I was asked by a customer to attend and be involved in their UK Business Excellence forum. Their leaders and experts gathered in one place to present and discuss what is happening in their world of work now and in the future.
One particular presentation really caught my attention. It showed how they now use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improve productivity.
There are no physical robots, it's largely computer programs talking to other programs to enable the complete task flow from start to finish. This could be for example completing a purchase order or filling out courier company documentation when shipping a product.
The robots even have their own software licences. They will open say Microsoft Outlook, take the necessary data from an email, copy it, open the courier company's online form on their website, then paste the details in, such as names, addresses, codes etc.
Work is now done in seconds
We saw a video demo of this and it took about a minute. Then to be told that the video had purposely slowed down the process so we could see what was going on. The process actually took seconds.
So when is a task worth automating? We were informed that once a task takes over 600 hours of human effort per year, then RPA is worth considering.
Many in the room were excited by the idea and asked when this would become available. "Right Now, the presenter happily told them. They have their own internal business unit who does it. Projects can be turned around in 3-6 months, from initial conversations to live implementation. Pretty impressive stuff.
So what do the robots give us?
Well, Robots don’t take holidays, so they can work 24/7 365 days a year. They give increased quality, productivity, and flexibility. They can do our core mundane tasks, leaving I believe, us humans to do what we do best, being creative, coming up with ideas, problem solving, analytical thinking………..Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) might have a large say in these things too soon.
Yes we sadly are losing, and have already lost many jobs to RPA. But many have been created because of it. I'll leave that conversation to another blog post once I've gathered some further data.