Getting an RPA program off the ground is no small feat. But, running them at scale across the business – that’s especially daunting for most organisations. 

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Too many CoE teams are stuck in a continuous loop of scheduling, monitoring, and managing bots to be truly effective in their roles. All too often, there is a capable and committed team of automation engineers that are constantly (…we’re talking 24/7, weekends, and even holidays!) glued to their machines watching bots perform, to ensure that processes run without failure.

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Not only is this maddening, costly, and risky—it’s undeniably limiting overall potential of the employee and the program to deliver sustainable value.

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But, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

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It’s possible to boost employee satisfaction, improve program efficiency and reduce overall cost. No surprise – it starts at the beginning – proper scheduling that aligns with desired business outcomes makes all the difference.

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What is Static (Manual) Scheduling, and Why Doesn’t it Work?

While robots can lighten your team’s workload, they can actually make it even more tedious and frustrating if they aren’t set up for success.

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Static scheduling refers to the process of manually scheduling tasks and workflows—and is what’s included in off-the-shelf RPA software.

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We all know how this works…

1. Enter process
2. Assign robots for execution
3. Watch as robots move sequentially through the list of scheduled processes

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That can work well enough with a basic RPA program. But, as complexity increases in terms of the number of licenses and/or the types of technologies in place — it’s just not flexible enough to meet changing demands. 

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Relying on manual execution to ensure that operations run smoothly is counterproductive for automation and a major reason why so many IA programs fall short of their goals.

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Let’s examine a few of the biggest reasons why dynamic solutions are the way forward.

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Increased Opportunity for Error

If you’re still manually scheduling your bots, you’re taking a big risk that tasks won’t be queued properly. 

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Static scheduling isn’t reliable enough for business critical tasks. This puts your team at risk of missing business deadlines. When this happens, many businesses start to become suspicious that RPA is a waste of money or even a liability, rather than the helpful tool it can be when used properly. 

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Decreased Productivity

There are two main factors that drive, or derail productivity — the bots, and the team behind the bots. 

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First, if you have to dedicate humans to continuously watch and reprioritize the work that robots are doing, it defeats the purpose of having automation. 

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Rather than focusing on developing and deploying automations that drive real value, teams often get bogged down in time consuming investigation and remediation – essentially becoming beholden to broken or misused robots. 

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From a bot perspective, static scheduling creates a lot of bottlenecks in process execution. Working in a sequential order can mean that some bots are tied up waiting for systems to be available—thus limiting their potential output. 

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Priority Confusion

When team members manually oversee robotic processes, it can sometimes create a chain reaction of confusion—potentially overriding and disrupting other mission-critical processes along the way. 

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Without some form of intelligent RPA orchestration in place to real-time monitor for conflicts and  SLA adherence, the risk of missed deadlines and costly compliance violations increases dramatically.

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With dynamic orchestration, there's software watching over your entire intelligent automation landscape guaranteeing everything goes off without a hitch.  There’s a new and better way to ensure you have happy employees and healthy robots.

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