Ever Abandoned an Automation Due to Complexity?

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Title. Looking to understand if there are any types of processes that are too difficult to automate or too hard to justify ROI given the current tooling. Would love to hear about it.

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Yes. Not every process is meant for automation

  1. Highly Unstructured or Variable Processes
  2. Processes with Heavy Cognitive Decision-Making / Human dependency is more. We could try for Attended automation
  3. Process with low transaction volume. It is worth to compare the time taken for development, License cost, Support cost vs the benefits it is getting generated due to automation. In some cases - Accuracy might be more important than the benefits. Example - Compliance processes.
  4. Processes with Complex or Changing Business Rules.
  5. Processes Dependent on Unstable or Legacy Systems

I am sure there needs to be a detailed analysis before selecting a process for automation. Some of the criteria’s are highlighted in Automation Hub

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Hey, thanks for getting back to me.

Do you have any specific examples? Would love to understand these kinds of processes more.

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Client Use Case: Automated Answering of PDF Questions

Background:

  • A client has a use case involving over 300 questions in a PDF that need to be answered manually.
  • Answers are based on a previously filled document.
  • The PDFs come in different formats, and the questions may not exactly match.

Challenges:

  1. Identifying Answers:
  • The first challenge was to identify the answers to these questions by referring to the previous document.
  • Solution: AI technology was used to train a model that could provide answers based on the previous feed. This was successfully implemented.
  1. Updating the PDF with Answers:
  • The second challenge was to update the PDF with answers once it is uploaded, given the varying formats from different clients.
  • This challenge is not considered a good candidate for RPA (Robotic Process Automation) due to the format differences.
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How often would you say that RPA teams turn down automation requests due to the cognitive decision making / changing biz values? Is that a common type of request from SMEs?

Or do they know the bounds of “what is a good case for automation” vs what is not?

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there are both ends: simple processes (one end) and complex processes (other end)
and there is the math / given ROI

  • whenever the realization will not bring back the investment, then the decission of “automate the process” is to recheck

we also recommend not to oversee the resulting effort (analysis, development, testing, general project management …) which can change the decission of doing the process in RPA along to other factors mentioned above.

But we would also highlight, that there are other factors which may can set the ROI check to another priority (Business Continuity, human resource availabilty).

Fazit: there are technical, formal, organisational and strategic factors, which decides if a process will be automated with RPA or not

depends on client situation and varies

with the given factors from above can be formal break down to rating criterias and applied on different rating techniques: