Chet Chambers is chief evangelist in the Americas at UiPath.
In most of my automated process examples, I use my hypothetical human example, Martha, and a generic process to explain where to start automating. The examples are a good place to start but still vague and I get asked often for advice on where to start automating more specifically. Well, here is my response to that question: a real example of a process that we automate at UiPath using our Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
We started the same way that we tell our customers to—by looking for repetitive processes that are necessary, but tedious. Finding these opportunities for automation starts with a single piece or person in a process.
In our case, a marketer named Ben noticed that he and his team spent a lot of time updating Salesforce with possible leads.
Sales collected leads from events and marketing campaigns, and then someone else needed to put that information in Salesforce and keep it updated. At UiPath, we love talking to customers and seeing people at events, but (like most people) we aren’t too thrilled with the data entry aspect of the job.
Ben brought this process to our developers and together they made a video recording of Ben at his computer updating leads in Salesforce. From that video, they were able to create documentation of the process that included every detail and exception.
People often forget little details about a process when they think about it, so the recording ensures that every click and every save is documented.
The documentation was then handed over to a developer, in this case, an intern named Rebecca, and she got to work building the Robot. While making the Robot, Rebecca discovered a few flaws in the process that she was able to fix that made the process even more efficient.
In about two hours Rebecca was finished and the Robot was able to pull information, and either update existing or create new lead profiles in Salesforce.
This Robot was put into production not long ago and it is estimated that the work automated will save more than 200 workforce hours.
The automation saves time for both our marketing and sales teams and now they can spend more time with customers than with Salesforce. Not to mention, Ben is much happier throughout his workday without inputting data.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: automation is the future of work. At UiPath we believe that so strongly, that we even use our own RPA.
We hope you join us in this future of automation. You can learn how other organizations are using automation in innovative ways by checking out my video interview series: Chatting with Chet.
