On the first week of September 2018, Accesa participated at Gennex, the interactive business conference addressing the challenges of the digital business world in Zurich (Switzerland). The goal of this conference is to help leaders catalyze innovation to transform their business and win in a digital world. We gave participants an understanding of our approach to digital transformation and especially to RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

At our booth, we presented how Accesa can support traditional businesses to transform into tomorrow’s businesses, with the help of an interactive storyboard.

During the Gennex conference, our colleague Clemens Schaeffner and Julian Jobstreibizer, from our partner UiPath, held a workshop about RPA and why robots will be a part of the workforce soon. During this workshop, we discussed RPA in general and the main concerns of our participants on the RPA topic.

After receiving the participant’s feedback, we developed three important insights about RPA:

How does RPA work and which tasks are suitable for RPA?

RPA is suitable for processes that are repetitive, manual and rule-based. A robot works with business applications, like SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft CRM or web applications. The robot does it in the same way as a person would do.

RPA aims to replace repetitive tasks performed by humans, with a human-operated virtual workforce. The human interaction with the application is recorded and parameterized to run unattended by the robot.

Why use RPA instead of improving the existing system?

If we had a perfect IT-infrastructure, we would not need RPA. In theory, interfaces and workflows between the existing systems could be expanded in such a way that RPA would be needless.

But such an upgrade is much more complex. It requires more internal resources and it takes more time. It is much more expensive than implementing a robot, that can work with existing user-interfaces like a human would.

RPA is transforming not replacing work

From a leadership perspective, it is important to address the employees’ fear of RPA. You may start by communicating that RPA will transform, not replace humans’ work. RPA allows keeping repetitive and labor-intensive work in high-priced countries.

Then, the leader should address the topic of employee qualification as early as possible. This enables a greater support from the workforce. Robotic Process Automation can replace one-sided repeated work, unleashing resources for exceptional cases and more specialized tasks.

We were more than pleased to have these discussions with interested visitors about how we can help them to enhance workplace productivity with RPA or other IT services.

Needless to say that we are looking forward to GENNEX 2019 – Minds without Limits event.