The OSS / RPA parrot on the shoulder analogy

This is the fourth in a series about the four styles of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) in OSS.

The third style is Decision Support. I refer to this style as the parrot on the shoulder because the parrot (RPA) guides the operator through their daily activities. It isn’t true automation but it can provide one of the best cost-benefit ratios of the different RPA styles. It can be a great blend of human-computer decision making.

OSS processes tend to have complex decision trees and need different actions performed depending on the information being presented. An example might be a customer on-boarding, which includes credit and identity check sub-processes, followed by the customer service order entry.

The RPA can guide the operator to perform each of the steps along the process including the mandatory fields to populate for regulatory purposes. It can also recommend the correct pull-down options to select so that the operator traverses the correct branch of the decision tree of each sub-process.

This functionality can allow organisations to deliver less training than they would without decision support. It can be highly cost-effective in situations where:

  • There are many inexperienced operators, especially if there is high staff turnover such as in NOCs, contact centres, etc
  • It is essential to have high process / data quality
  • The solution isn’t intuitive and it is easy to miss steps, such as a process that requires an operator to swivel-chair between multiple applications
  • There are many branches on the decision tree, especially when some of the branches are rarely traversed, even by experienced operators

In these situations the cost of training can far outweigh the cost of building an OSS (RPA) parrot on each operator’s shoulder.

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