How RPA robots change the way people think

05-Dec-2019

Meanwhile many companies are worried with attitude their employees show to any kind of automation as they are frightened of missing their job spots. The trends of the second decade of XXI century show us that in future we'll face the complex change in our daily routine. Each industrial revolution in history changed the people's mindset: first helped to reduce the manual work, which led to many people changing their specializations; second – which made mass manufacturing possible – was a big step for appearance of a wide number of different professions and technologies; the third one made human experience digital, increased the speed at which people work, made the communication easier and, again, pushed aside the necessity in many different engineering skills. The latter one also made the horizontal connections more important than centralized business management.

Chief Product Officer of RPA platform PIX Maxim Yatskevich shares his thoughts on how RPA changes the minds of people and if we are going to face the skills mismatch in the nearest future

Nowadays many companies are trying to implement chatbots, voice assistants and other modern but not yet perfect technologies in order to replace employees. What companies often forget is that while doing such changes they should explain to people why they are doing so: which benefits the changes bear, how the corporate structure and culture will change etc. What this basically means is that the company should educate its employees regarding automation and the overall corporate attitude to it should be enhanced.

NEW ERA, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW CULTURE

A few years ago the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology has appeared providing companies with the tool to make routine repetitive tasks faster, improve customer experience and job mapping. Indeed, RPA provides a number of benefits while building the integration with legacy-systems between each other as far as modern software. Robots are more organized and faster than real people and could be used to assist employees at their desktops.

Robotization is one the Industry 4.0 associates. The idea behind RPA is to almost entirely replace low-skilled jobs with digital workforce. Once it happens, it will really lead to release of large amount of old-school resources, at the same time giving them opportunity to undergo recharacterisation and acquire skills required for highly intelligent professions.

As a result, many companies prefer lighter solutions which help to get so called «quick-wins» immediately but not in months or even years.

MANUAL WORK: ISSUES OF GOING DIGITAL

Manual work consumes too much time. It literally steals time both from the employee and the business itself. At the same time manual processing makes it impossible to build real-time connections between systems which is a requirement for any high-tech company. Yet replacing the legacy-systems with the modern software is quite an investment. Additionally, even if the company picks up the idea of replacing their legacy system, by the time the system will be finally implemented, it can get outdated by itself. That's why most companies are not so eager to invest into new software development.

The main question today is: why do many companies from different industries still continue processing millions of transactions daily using the manual workforce instead of going for effective automated solutions? The question isn't that simple. The not-so-effective manual work means the higher added value for the resulting product which is partly beneficial for the money turnover. At the same time this process postpones the digital transformation which – while still requiring some investments – has relatively fast self-repayment period (for RPA it is usually around 6 months).

The demand for RPA technology keeps constantly growing according to Gartner report. For example, in 2018 it experienced a significant increase of 63%.

NECESSARY STEPS FOR CORPORATE CULTURAL ENCHANCEMENT

The main problem – as it has been stated earlier – for automation implementation at corporate level is the necessity to change the corporate culture. The culture is the secret ingredient that makes proactive ideas, collegiate movements and other personnel support possible. We can mark several directions here:

Motivation
This is the element which leads to the maximum anxiety to enhance the workplace and – as a result – to the corporate culture. The entire personnel should be motivated starting from the seniors and going down to the entry-level employees. The ideal case here is when the management understand it can earn more while the executioners feel like they have more interesting and creative work to do.
Management
The worldwide digital transformation experience supports the idea that it should be delivered down from the top, not wise-versa. Otherwise it can drown in infinite cycles of approval and budgeting. It is also important that the digital transformation (and RPA implementation as well) should be led by the leaders who are really capable of changing the people's minds and their approach to daily routine.
Personnel
Digitalization nowadays catches the speed, though, as many different surveys show, more than third of the employees are against any changes in their work. This number can double once it is announced that people will get replaced with programmable robots.
Support and consultation
It is a good idea to ask the professional consultants for help which can prevent the lion's share of management mistakes from the beginning as far as support the entire project. Consultants can provide significant help but it's important to remember that they are only performing supporting role not managing.
Accurate presentation of results
The new company goals should be well-defined and understandable for each employee. The change of the corporate culture should answer the real needs of business. The results of the project depend on how well both the management and personnel understand the importance of achieving personal and corporate strategic goals.
Risks
If the risks are determined and measured correctly, it's possible to manage them adequately by performing some proactive actions: the fear of automation within companies isn't something new.

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The newest modern technologies such as AI, RPA and IoT are drastically influencing the contemporary job market. Basically it is possible to forecast have the professions will shift within 5-10 years by closely looking at what's appearing now.

If the company needs happy and productive employees, it should guarantee them the stability of their work places, transforming into digital enterprise by not only digitalizing its production and business processes, but also remodeling the people's mindset by altering and enhancing it's culture.

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