Reference no: EM133106490

Poor Planning for Robots

Factory robots have been around for a while, but using robotics to automate office work is still a fairly new development. Managers are seeing the potential for robotic process automation, including claims of process costs being cut by more than half. Furthermore, robots don't get distracted or tired, so they can work faster and more accurately at tasks like entering or formatting data.

Despite the advantages, organizations struggle to achieve the full benefits of automating business processes. One problem is the temptation to skip steps in planning: looking at existing tasks and picking out a few to automate, without considering how the tasks fit into the whole process. If the current process is inefficient, robots speed up efficiency, but if the current process is unfriendly to customers, robots just do unfriendliness more efficiently.

Furthermore, planners do not always fully assess their current inputs. Data must be accurate, whether processed by humans or computers. And shifting routine tasks from humans to bots will change the human resource requirements. Organizations need to redefine what skills will be needed, including the potential for employees to contribute more in the realm of analyzing information and using people skills to build stronger relationships with customers and suppliers.

Questions

• Suppose a company receives orders by e-mail and has employees read the orders and enter data about each one into a spreadsheet for the billing department and a planning system for the production department. Then the employees generate e-mail messages to each customer to acknowledge each order. Would you describe this process as efficient? Why or why not?
• Suppose the same company wants to use bots to automate these tasks. How should the company go about planning for this change in inputs?