Smart Automation vs. Mindless Automation

Every company wants more “bots” — it sounds great — use a bot to take repetitive labor out of the business processes, which results in being able to do more business with the same number of people, which lowers SG&A and other expenses over time.

Vendors such as UI Path and Automation Anywhere are great examples of successful bot implementors. They come in, look at what you are doing, and then suggest bot implementations to speed it up. But there is a problem with this approach.

Most RPA (Robotic Process Automation) companies automate whatever they find. If a process is inefficient, that’s actually in their favor. If an onerous processes can be made faster, often through screen scraping and auto-copy-and-pasting, that’s fine by them, for they are able to show a gain and a payback.

The problem is that it is not the right thing to do. Often we get so busy chopping down trees that we don’t stop to sharpen the axe, yet a sharp axe can speed the overall job up 500%.

SAP, on the other hand, offers a much more holistic approach to automation. We focus on a suite of tools for process excellence, with the goal of understanding all the process variants that are present, remediating processes so that they become much better, and then using smart automation to help people get more done, the right way, every day. This is why we call our automation product SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation — we strive to not just brute force automate but rather we make sure the processes are as well-tuned as they can be before adding automation to them.  We then add pre-developed content — in essence, bots that we have created (and continue to release monthly) for our customers — so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel. Lastly, instead of interfacing at the UI layer which is prone to break easily, we focus on being API (Application Program Interface) first, so even when programs change, your automations remain carefree and humming right along.

There is a great difference between Smart Automation vs. Mindless Automation.

Thanks,

Bob