The Big Picture¶
Most Robotic Process Automation or automation scripts gets a data load, typically from an Excel sheet or from a database. It will then perform some work, where either all, some of it or none of it goes as expected. Once everything is said and done, typically an email will be sent to a mailbox that was agreed beforehand, with some sort of report of how this iteration went.
As such and for the individual case, this approach is ok. You use the tools you have and are already familiar with, and create an interface that both employees and software can understand.
The problem comes when you want to scale your operations and your automation setup. Once you have the same 2-3 users getting help from 20 automation scripts instead of one, it becomes difficult to manage. Likewise, once you start adding new users they might get less training and information is lost in regards to small hacks, magic variables and other things that was agreed back when the script was developed. This leads to many hours spent retracing steps in order to explain what was previously agreed upon.
What we have seen countless times is that a situation quickly developers where
- Automatic jobs becomes a blackbox for consumers
- Consumers have low flexibility, no error handling, terrible overview and a high barrier of entry in order to use the automatic jobs.
This pushes operational challenges to the developer, often because the alternative creates even greater problems for the developer.
When building and scaling process automation in an organization, it should only really be the specific scripts that implements the business rules and interaction with local systems that should need to be built by the local development team. All the parts around the automation setup - Input data, monitoring, alarms, audit trail, reporting and similar functionality - is rarely something unique for your organization, and it is often costly to build right and get the amount of functionality you want to give your consumers. In the same way that you wouldn't build your own system to manage projects, a scrum process or support tickets from customers, you shouldn't have to hack together your own system to manage your automation setup.
Our philosophy¶
- We want to be your automation enabler.
- We want to make business operations independent of Development.
- Giving flexibility and control without the power to break
- We want to make it faster and easier to spin up automations - end-to-end!
- The sooner code is in production, the sooner you can start getting value from it.
- Automate with the right tool for the job
- Not everything is a nail. Use the best technologies for the job and stitch them together seemlessly