Back in 2016, Professor Leslie Willcocks was using the line "taking the robot out of the human" to describe RPA. At that time only RPA was the topic discuss not yet much about Intelligent Automation.

"Taking the robot out of the human" meant removing all basic repetitive tasks that all workers are performing in their day to day job. Lot of numbers have been publish explaining how much of these tasks represent in percentage of the day job, and the potential positive and negative impact of automating them. I do not discuss these numbers because I think it can vary a lot from one company to another and even from one department to another inside the same company.

But I do agree that to some extend the majority of these repetitive tasks (sometime useless) could be done by a software robots. Yet, five years later, a lot of company haven't tackle the topic, at least the companies we are visiting and talking to.

So Why companies haven't yet tackle the topic? We have asked the question each time we started a discussion with a company. The following results are only representative to the people/companies we talked to, we are not trying to draw global bullet proof conclusion.

The five top reasons provided were:

The Cost:

Most of the time, when initiating an RPA project, companies look at the pure RPA player and/or no code platform. These solution come at a premium price, and as they are having a different pricing model, it's not always simple to do a cost comparison.

If additionally, you are looking at the full spectrum of Intelligent Automation, then the initial complexity is increasing drastically and the cost too.

Budget is something subjective as it depends on each company, having lot of money doesn't always mean making the best decision nor having the most successful project outcome.

There are solution on the market that do not require high upfront cost, sometimes even no upfront cost, we are part of them. If you want to have more info about them, feel free to contact us.

Where to start:

Should it be a top down approach or bottom up? Should we plan a 3 years company-wide vision or start small with low hanging fruit in some department? Should it be a technology project or a business transformation project?

Is there one recipe that would work for all, I personally don't think so. Company size, company culture, industry type, current level of digitalisation, ... are some of the factor that need to be taken into consideration in order to define the best approach. The third reason mentioned above also need to be evaluated in your company in order to make the best solution.

At rpfact we usually work with small-medium size company, and proposed the following approach:

We will discuss the three other reasons and more in the next parts.