TIME IS PRECIOUS
Since the invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford, industry has been automating everything that can be automated. And nowadays there would be no other way how to do it. Neither can people do everything by hand, nor could we pay for the finished product according to the cost of production.
The situation is quite different for many other business processes. Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany sit in front of their computers every day and repeat the same tasks over and over again. They transfer numbers from one table to another or copy numbers from quotations into the data fields of ERP systems. You know what I mean, all of us have these repetitive activities that are mindless and eat up way too much of our lives.
Technology is already advanced enough to automate these activities, but this potential is not yet being exploited. Above all, automation fuels the fear of losing one’s job. After all, if one’s job is performed by a computer, what raison d’être do I have?
This always makes me wonder what kind of existence it is to simply write data from A to B all the time. This time could be filled with so many more meaningful things. For example, one could use this time to think about how to move the company forward in other areas. Such as in new market segments. You could think about how to improve existing products. One could use the time to perform challenging or creative tasks with more care. This maintains quality and ensures the company’s own competitiveness. You could even use the time to have coffee with your colleagues. This social time gives us humans more benefits than repeating mindless work every day and getting tired in the long run.
And precisely this new freedom to be more creative, spend time in a social environment or simply create something really new increases inner satisfaction. More satisfaction of individuals and more satisfaction of the whole team.
Developments in the new world of work inevitably mean that we have to find and apply new methods of collaboration. These include more freedoms, more trust and more connectedness. The development of new corporate cultures goes hand in hand with relieving the burden of unpleasant tasks. Both aspects, the step towards a contemporary corporate culture and towards automation, open up new and completely undiscovered potentials among the employees that advance the entire company.
But how does RPA actually work?
Basically, RPA is a digital robot that looks at the action steps of humans and copies them. The robots work non-invasively, meaning they do not need to be written into the source code of individual software solutions. Simply put, they use the mouse and keyboard just like humans do. In doing so, they can open and describe ERP systems. They can open web pages, read the contents and save them to another location. Somewhat useless, but very simple would be for the robot to read the weather and traffic data every morning on the Internet and then send them summarized as a message by e-mail to your cell phone. A far more useful example would be to capture customer inventory levels from different warehouses around the world and write them into the ERP system. This would mean that the current data for the company’s own production planning would always be available.
The possibilities with RPA are vast. RPA can take companies a long way and, in particular, keep European companies internationally competitive, despite the high cost of labor, while easing the burden on employees and increasing the quality of life.
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