RPA technology is a key example of the democratization that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing to non‐IT professionals, which will be able to do more with their existing systems at a reasonable cost. The twenty‐first century should have been showing much more of what Peter Drucker called knowledge work where nonroutine, mental work is driving the economic prosperity and value creation of the global business world (Drucker 2012). Utilizing automation will be paramount to free up our knowledge work from menial, rote tasks and to help the logistics industry look to innovate in other areas. The use cases for RPA as representing lightweight IT are rising, as there are more IT proficient non‐IT professionals that would be enabled to quickly make cheap, customized applications for automating tasks in an “innovation arena” (Bygstad 2016). As logistics companies around the globe are struggling to identify initial pilots into the digitalization space, we recommend that you take a hard look at whether RPA might be that first project.
Key Takeaways
Workflow automation will threaten the offshoring of white‐collar jobs as it becomes easier to use and more affordable.
Internal communication regarding automation plans needs to be carefully considered and designed as the results of not informing staff about them can lead to unrest in the workplace. Training a bot can be as simple as pressing a button and having the software record the actions of a user at their computer.
Process mining and mapping are a critical step in identifying tasks that are ripe for automation and process improvement.
Consideration of using RPA should be driven by the number of tasks that you have that are repetitive, independent of human input, require no physical input, low subjectivity needs, and substantial in terms of the number of tasks being done by internal staff.
References
Business Intelligence: Third European Summer School, eBISS 2013, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, July 7‐12, 2013, Tutorial Lectures
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