Seven roadblocks you may face in your automation journey. Digital workforce has evolved as an integral part of modern-day enterprise in the last few years. The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market has already grown by 63.1% in 2018 to $846mn1 and is estimated to be worth $2.4bn by 20222. Digital workforce mimics human actions on the user interface layer of applications, which makes it more user friendly and secure, as compared to traditional API based automation.
Let’s understand this with the help of an example. Consider a scenario where an HR executive has to add the details of a new employee received through E-Mail into the ERP system. The HR executive performs the following steps to complete the job:
Seven roadblocks you may face in your automation journey
- Open the E-Mail Application
- Navigate to inbox
- Open the ERP Application
- Navigate to New Employee form
- Read the details from E-Mail
- Enter the details into the ERP application
A digital worker would mimic each of these steps with far better speed and accuracy than the HR executive. Furthermore, digital worker keeps going 24*7 without any breaks.
While digital workforce has become an important part of modern-day enterprises considering the advantages and value it has to offer, there are certain ground level challenges, which have to be addressed. For example, it is a very common scenario that an enterprise application is down for maintenance during a certain period.
The human worker understands that and tries to complete the job either by accessing a different application or by attempting the job post the maintenance period, whereas a digital worker throws an exception stating that application is not available.
In order to ensure the continuity of business-critical processes being executed by digital workers in a fragile application and infrastructure ecosystem, the key challenges have to be identified and handled in run time.
Although the road has been paved for organizations to start their automation journey and reach the destination, there are bumps on the road. These bumps need to be identified and called out loudly so that a strategy to drive through these can be devised. Following are a few challenges that organizations may face in their automation journey:
Application unresponsiveness
Digital workers access specific applications in order to complete the assigned job. In continuation with above example, a digital worker needs to access an ERP application to add or update employee records. While it attempts to access the ERP application, the application may be unresponsive due to various reasons cited below:
- The application may be down for maintenance
- There may be network connectivity issues
- The application server may not have been able to handle the load and crashed
In each of the above scenarios, the digital worker is unable to update the employee records and thus is not able to complete the assigned job.
Change in application credentials
Digital workers need login credentials in order to access applications that require sign-in.
As per the standard organization policies, the application passwords or the SSO passwords expire after a certain defined period and have to be reset. Once the credentials are reset as per the organization’s policy, digital workers are not able to access the application with the earlier configured credentials, thus are unable to complete the assigned job.
Accidental access to digital-worker-run applications
Seven roadblocks you may face in your automation journey. Similar to human workers, digital workers execute the assigned jobs by working on specific application on a given machine. But unlike human workers, multiple digital workers share the same machine to execute the assigned jobs in order to optimize the usage of the machine.
Like any other software, digital workers too encounter exceptions occasionally. The administrator and the monitoring teams thus access the digital workers’ machine in order to understand why the exception occurred and collect the required information to fix the exception & to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Since multiple digital workers are working on the same machine, it may happen that while the monitoring team is analyzing the exception encountered by one of the digital workers, they may accidentally access applications being accessed by other digital workers.
Consider a banking scenario where money transfer in a specific currency is involved. Even a small accidental change in currency can cause huge financial irregularities for the organization.
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