your house, the expectations in the business‐to‐business sector shift as well (Sheetz 2017). In international shipping, this has traditionally been a huge issue as carriers, forwarders, port authorities, rail operators, customs agencies, trucking companies, warehouses, and their customers often all have different levels of digital communication capabilities. In this scenario where a buyer of a container of goods in the United States wants to track his cargo from China to his warehouse door outside of Chicago, Illinois, they most often look to their freight forwarder as an aggregator of data and communication window. The freight forwarder typically does not directly own or control any of the carriers along the way, so they must find ways of grabbing event milestones to give updates to their customers. They have a few different options when it comes to retrieving such milestones. First, they could have direct integration with each of these carriers via EDI, although it requires a significant investment in mapping event fields from the carrier's system back to the forwarder's system. Second, they could have their staff locally go to each carrier website and retrieve the information as it is updated and key it back into their tracking database manually. Third, they could identify low‐cost labor in an offshore location to update and key in the data. Fourth, they could pay a third‐party aggregator for the milestones who often utilizes a combination of cheap labor and EDI connections. Lastly, they could train or hire someone to train an RPA bot that could go out and do the work of their local or offshore staff.
As previously mentioned, the key is to have a highly repeatable task. The task is mental and independent and does not have huge volumes happening at the same time if used by a small‐ to medium‐sized company. Typically, the forwarder and carriers are not updating their system's interfaces frequently, so training the bot to navigate to different fields on a carrier's website and the forwarder's ERP system is feasible. Managers need to consider whether or not their systems will be changing soon in terms of the interface or the architecture as that will help to also decide whether to use RPA (Penttinen et al. 2018). If, for example, your company just rolled out the logistics platform CargoWise and there are no updates to your ERP coming soon, then it might make sense to start an RPA pilot. A difficulty here would be in the formatting of identifications used by different carriers and modes of shipping; however, this task is surmountable. The key is figuring out which trigger would initiate the bots tracking of events and dictating how often it would need to go out to find those events.
RPA Adoption at DHL
RPA adoption in logistics has shown many of the same positive results that have been seen in other industries. Notably, DHL, one of the largest global logistics providers, were early adopters of the technology and have seen massive returns through time saved by RPA bots. DHL Supply Chain in North America has offset over 5000 hours of manual work with RPA, and globally, there were over 30 000 hours saved per year during the pilot programs that they rolled out (Selko 2019). “Before RPA many basic, day‐to‐day tasks would need to wait to be completed until capacity allowed. Now they are done quickly and with a high level of accuracy, freeing our employees to spend less time doing busy work and more time doing the strategic value‐added work they enjoy,” said Jim Monkmeyer, president, transportation, DHL Supply Chain, North America (Selko 2019). DHL's RPA ambitions did not end with these savings though as they look to double the number of hours saved by the end of 2020. DHL's bots have been deployed primarily for assembling documents to create pay on delivery (POD) as well as scheduling deliveries and tracking milestones. In the future, they plan to use RPA combined with AI to automate more complicated tasks.
Navigating Your RPA Journey
Who Should Own This RPA Journey?
If you decided to go ahead and start the process of using RPA in your company, the first task would be to assign individuals to lead the project. A chief information officer (CIO) should have the knowledge and internal leverage to be able to coordinate between RPA developers and business teams. The CIO should be able to facilitate the cohabitation of bot and worker in terms of translating internal work rules into conditional statements that the bot could follow (Hallikainen et al. 2018). This is opposed to a director of operations or IT who could potentially only coordinate one side of the equation. In highly global organizations, there is also a question around the amount of leverage regional executives would have in influencing and capturing processes outside the scope of their entity. In this way, RPA should be enacted in a controlled ecosystem at a local level or by a top‐down approach from executives with similar skillsets to a CIO with the same amount of leverage to enact change. Regardless of whether an organization decides to build out its RPA program internally or have a consultant to support, the organization's IT department must be engaged and educated to facilitate negotiations and build the business case (Hallikainen et al. 2018). Having buy‐in from a cross‐functional leader and the support of IT will be key to the success of your project.
Process Mining and Process Mapping
Once you have decided who will lead your project, the next step is to start to understand which tasks could use an RPA bot to help create efficiency. To do this, leading RPA consultants recommend that you first do an audit of your processes through process mining and then map current processes. In some cases, there is a software that can sit on your computer that will mine the clicks and keyboard strokes of your staff to learn the most common behavior and map the steps for you. By observing the human handling complex cases, the RPA system can learn. There is also an obvious link with process mining (van der Aalst 2016; Kerremans 2018). For example, RPA vendor UiPath and process mining vendor Celonis collaborate to automatically visualize and select processes with the highest automation potential and subsequently build, test, and deploy RPA agents driven by the discovered process models.
UiPath and other RPA providers often offer process recorders that could speed up the time it takes to capture and map out processes manually by having the software record actions, such as mouse clicks and keyboard entries, of a human user (Frank 2015). RPA bots also can interact with multiple systems simultaneously and can even work with humans and indicate a need for further assistance (Hallikainen et al. 2018). Whether you decide to mine and map your processes before you choose your provider is probably best dictated after some preliminary budgets on how much you are willing to invest with your RPA provider.
Choosing the Right RPA Provider
With the people and processes now in place, you must pick which RPA provider to partner with. Blue Prism, a leading RPA provider that has been given credit for inventing the acronym RPA, was launched in 2001, and subsequently, there have been over 45 providers that have entered the market as of 2017 (Lacity and Willcocks 2018). As a buyer, this leaves a daunting task of trying to figure out which provider is right for you. Many of the providers and the products they offer that could be considered RPA are drastically different in terms of the upfront and monthly costs as well as the amount of human input needed (Hindle et al. 2018). Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath are widely regarded as the top three RPA providers and offer different levels of engagement depending on how much training you want to do yourself. Consultants often specialize in one of the above and are even willing to give you a free proof of concept. Other leading RPA providers include AutomationEdge, Cognizant, Conduent, Kofax, Kryon Systems, Pegasystems, and Softomotive.
Change Management Considerations
UiPath stresses the importance of establishing a center of excellence, a group of IT‐savvy professionals who have the bandwidth to learn and champion this project, in any company that has decided to implement RPA. Within the center of excellence, they identify several roles to help support adoption, champion the setup and maintenance of bots, and analyze bot performance. One of these roles is the RPA change manager who should be tasked with overseeing the onboarding of stakeholders in using RPA technology. UiPath emphasizes that one of the most effective tools for these change managers is clear
