Roadmap towards efficient achievement of human-robot collaboration

Along the way, the role of the human workforce is to engage in critical thinking about optimal automation procedures and steps, which presumably leads to the attainment of business objectives most efficiently.

To put it very simply, the story looks like this: a human employee starts a task, enables an attended bot to continue, and then automatically triggers an unattended bot to finalize the activity. But the devil is in the details, so you should keep reading.

1. The natural beginning is the use of strongly controlled unattended automation for simple, routine processes

The human employees’ part of the job is task and decision tree design. The repetitive nature of the tasks is then developed by reiteration. Further on, human intervention is called for only when process adjustments are necessary. Human - robot handoff is seamless: the bots are notified and can resume the process as soon as the employees fulfill the required modifications.

2. People and robots share responsibility when using attended automation.

The more complex tasks which are better suited for intelligent automation understood as RPA augmented with the ability to learn judgemental activities from observations of human processing requests, require human input within a command center for analysis, approval, and control purposes.

Human employees’ primary job is to design software robots’ workflows and decision trees, delegating and prioritising tasks according to contextual needs. They literally attend the bots by monitoring the ongoing processes, and by intervening when issues occur.

There are two attended automation methods at your disposal:

2.1. Robot Helper. In this approach, each employee is paired with one robot, which provides support for the repetitive, mundane, high-volume, template-driven activities that are part of their workload. It is particularly useful for small and medium businesses.

2.2. Captain and Crew. Either one or a small group of employees are assigned by their department to be in charge of a whole group of bots. This method is highly scalable.

3. Human and robot tasks can be orchestrated by linking several processes via Long Running activities in UiPath Studio

Bots’ part of the job is to order the tasks that are to be handled by humans. The main benefit is time efficiency: while human tasks are pending, robots can undertake new activities, and thus not a bit of time is wasted.

4. Monitoring the long-running workflows and keeping track of the processes executed by software robots in the extended workflow

This is crucial for efficient end-to-end automation. Efficiency comes from the timely identification and resolution of ‘resource bottlenecks’, which allows for improved decision making. Spelling out who did what throughout the execution process, i.e., disentangling human-robot collaboration, warrants further workflow optimization.

A great example of human-robot collaboration can be seen in the video below, where a bot is helping the use fetch information from Salesforce, thus saving time.