As a leader in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software industry, UiPath is a driving force behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution with its end-to-end platform for automation that enables organizations across all industries to scale digital business operations at unprecedented pace. In a series of editorials, UiPath will share their vision on Automation in Insurance, sharing use cases, lessons learnt, governance, top tips and much more. In the previous article we looked at ‘personal automation’ to help employees get work done by augmenting them with a robot that takes care of the repetitive tasks in their daily work. “A robot for every person” that allows to automate the ‘automatable’ – what a great thought. So what does that look like in reality?

Companies can create and distribute personal automations to employees or give them the power to build a personal automation to address unique tasks themselves. The term ‘citizen developer’ comes to mind. If we look back to the long tail of automation, these personal automations can add up to a significant scale and drive large-scale ROI.

UiPath has been working with pioneering customers in this field and we’ve found that common types of personal automations help employees with work that falls into five main buckets:

These can vary quite significantly, by industry and role.

For example, at an insurance company, an underwriter could use a personal automation to extract data from third-party systems to assess risk. A relationship manager at an insurance company can set up a personal automation to validate and reconcile data in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. An insurance claims officer can work with a robot to quickly take action to resolve a customer incident (click the graphic below for a larger version).

With robots by their side, people get work done faster and get time back to focus on the work that they do better than robots (handling complexity, making associations, dealing with abstraction). People can hand off work to robots, or they can work side-by-side with robots. Employees can also set up event-driven automations so robots watch for things that happen on the desktop. When an event occurs (for example, an employee logs into a system and takes an action), robots automatically get to work. There are many ways people can work with robots to support their day-to-day work. The result is increased productivity, increased employee engagement, and decreased error rates.

Running an effective robot for every person program at scale requires training, management, and governance. When you deploy personal automation without structure, you risk automation sprawl. Personal automation without governance creates the same – negative – effect around the automation program. So, it’s vitally important that when you start enabling personal automations, make sure that you roll out the appropriate governance tools.

The UiPath vision of a fully automated enterprise™ leverages both types – workflow and personal – of automations.